Quicksilver User Manual

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Radial Menus 44 ....... Command Objects and Droplets 47 Part III - Features 49 Files and Folders 49 .............................. Basic File Actions 51 ................. File Tagging and Spotlight 54 ... File Compression and Disk Images 56 ..................................... Sending Files 57 ...................... File Transfer Programs 58 ........................................ Path Finder 59 ............................................... Deviant 59 Applications and Processes 59 ................... Basic Application Actions 60 ................ Advanced Process Actions 62 ......... Dynamically Accessing a Menu 63 iTunes 64 ............................................ Browsing 65 ......... Controlling iTunes and Triggers 67 ....................................... Preferences 67 Contacts 68 .................................... Address Book 68 .......................................... Entourage 72 ...................................... Now Contact 73 .......................................... BuddyPop 73 Mail 74 ............................................. Mail.app 76 .......................................... Entourage 77 .................................................. Gmail 77 ...................... Other Mail Applications 78 ................................................ Teleflip 78 Chat 79 .................................................. iChat 80 ................................................. Adium 80 Calendar 81 ..................................................... iCal 81 ................... Google Calendar Module 83 Web 83 ................................... Web Browsers 84 ................................. Online Services 86 ........................................ Web Pages 89 ................................... Web Searches 90 ....... Adding Web Searches Manually 94 ..................................... NetNewsWire 96 Text 96 .............................. Basic Text Actions 96 ........................................... Dictionary 99 ........................................... Spotlight 100 ......................................... Text Files 100 ................. Specially Formatted Text 102 Clipboard and Shelf 103 ............................. Clipboard History 103 ............................ Clipboard Storage 105 ................................................ Shelf 105 Comparing Clipboard History, Storage ......................................... and Shelf 106 Note Taking Applications 107 ...................................... VoodooPad 107 ............................................ Yojimbo 108 .................................... WikityWidget 109 Images 109 ............................................... iPhoto 109 ........................................ Slideshow 110 .................... Desktop Picture Action 110 ................................ Screen Capture 110 ......................... Image Manipulation 110 .................................... Flickr Upload 111 Quicksilver User Manual 3 System 111 ............................................ Devices 111 ....................................... Networking 113 ................................... Configuration 113 ............................................. Exposé 114 .................................... Extra Scripts 115 Development 116 ........................................ Automator 116 ........................................... Services 116 ........................................... Terminal 116 ................................................. CLIX 118 ......................... Command Line Tool 118 ............... Developer Documentation 119 ....................................... Subversion 119 ............................................. Eclipse 120 .............................. Remote Desktop 120 Part IV - Appendix 120 FAQ 120 .................. Leopard Specific Things 122 Troubleshooting 123 Extending Quicksilver 124 Random Notes 124 ...................................... Results List 124 Quicksilver User Manual 4 How To Read this Manual Quicksilver 9s strength is that it integrates with so many different aspects of your Mac. Rather than cover each of the 100 or so plug-ins in some arbitrary order (e.g., alphabetically), the bulk of this manual is organized around topics such as working with files, contacts, email, or web browsers (roughly the Plug-in Preferences categories). Grouping similar plug-in information to- gether avoids duplication and makes it easier to compare capabilities. Each section includes general usage and configuration instructions, as well as troubleshooting hints and tips for using features more efficiently using advanced Quicksilver features. New users should be able to start using the features quickly and experienced users will probably find some- thing new about many features. The following sections should help in finding information about a topic whether basic or advanced. New Users Experienced Users Part I Introduction, installation, basic usage Read thoroughly Skim Part II Preferences and configuration Skim, refer back to when needed Read thoroughly Part III Plug-ins grouped by categories Read sections of interest. Look up unfamiliar things in Part I and II Read sections of interest Part IV Troubleshooting and extending Read as needed Read as needed Quicksilver User Manual 5 Part I - Introduction Introduction When I want to do something on my Mac, my first reaction is to use Quicksilver. Whether I want to send an email, search for something on the web, open a bookmark, open a file, start an ap- plication, send an IM, revisit a web page I looked at yesterday , pause iTunes or find a song, or virtually anything else, I type \x3 -space and activate Quicksilver to do it. That makes Quicksilver very powerful, but also a little difficult to explain. I 9ll use an example of sending email to my friend Ashish. First, I could open Mail, type 8 N to open a new message, type enough of Ashish to have her address appear in the To: field and then tab to the Subject and continuing writing the message. I could instead open Address Book, search for Ashish 9s card, and \x3 -click (or right-click) on the email address and choose Send Email. This is how I do it using Quicksilver. I type \x3 - space, A , Return . That 9s it. Let 9s walk through it. \x3 -space at any time, in any application, activates Quicksilver bringing up a two pane window shown here. When I type A , Ashish appears in the first pane because I often send her email. Her picture ap- pears because I have her picture in her Address Book entry (mostly because Quicksilver makes such good use of it). Also another window ap- pears with other choices. If I kept typing, those would change to be some other choice, but since Ashish is what I want, I 9m done. The second pane shows the Compose Email action which is what I want to do. Again this appears because it 9s the most common thing I do when I call up Ashish. Typing return performs the selected action so I see a new Compose Message win- dow appear from Mail.app with Ashish 9s address filled in. You might think using Quicksilver doesn 9t seem that much easier than the other methods I de- scribed, but the Quicksilver method is done en- tirely via keystrokes. There 9s no mousing to the Dock to open a particular icon or having to select a specific field, just type 3 keystrokes (one shifted). You might also think the comparison is unfair because I said some of the choices ap- peared so easily since I do this often, but that 9s one of the advantages of Quicksilver. It learns Quicksilver User Manual 6 what you do and makes your most frequent tasks easier. The other methods don 9t learn and don 9t get any easier. Now let 9s say I wanted to send a document to Ash- ish. Instead of choosing the default Compose Email action, I can tab to the second pane, type email i to choose Email item...(Compose) , this opens a third pane which I tab to and type ~/Q to choose the document in my home directory. Now the message window is opened with the attachment all set up. Say Ashish was expecting this document and I didn 9t need to include any text in the message, just the attachment. I could choose the action Email item...(Send) and then the message window does not open but the message is sent in the background without ever disturbing what I was doing before. The subject is set to the name of the attachment and a short sentence says the file is attached to the message. The above works if I 9m thinking, cI want to send Ashish this document d. Say instead I thought cI need to send this docu- ment to Ashish d. I can do this as well. Select the document in the first pane, choose the Email to...(Compose) action and then choose Ashish. Say she is online in iChat. There are actions to open a chat window with her or to send the file to her via iChat. I find these options the real strength of Quicksilver. It lets me easily do what I want, how I want. I don 9t need to change my thinking to how Quicksilver wants me to do things, and it learns from me and gets easier to use over time. The amazing thing about Quicksilver is how flexible it is. Via a wide variety of plug-ins, Quicksil- ver can select just about anything on your Mac as an object and do potentially hundreds of dif- ferent things to it. Of course, it can also do a lot more, get used to reading that. Concepts and Terminology Quicksilver is a very modular application. This manual is organized around the things that Quicksilver can manipulate such as files, text, music, etc. Various Quicksilver concepts and fa- cilities are introduced here so that the explanations in each following section can make use of them. A term introduced and defined is written like this . Quicksilver User Manual 7 To the right are the modifier key abbreviations used. Combinations are achieved by holding down one or more modifier keys and typing another key such as a letter, number or punctuation character. E.g., 8 ;, % 8 S, etc. The arrow keys are shown as: ? , , ? , and ? . Quicksilver runs as an application in the background at all times. Typically there is no menu, dock icon, menu bar icon or other indication of Quicksilver on screen until you activate it with the hot key (by default \x3 -space), though there are preferences to change this. Preferences are available by typing 8 , when Quicksilver is activated. Quicksilver commands are entered via two or three panes containing respectively an object , an action and if a third pane is needed, an argument . These are the terms used in this manual, but unfortunately other terms are used in some places in Quicksilver and in the forums and other articles. The primer interface labels the panes Subject, Action, and Object. Some forum posts use Subject, Verb, and Object; and others use Direct Object, Verb, and Indirect Object. This manual uses the terms in the diagram above. As you type into one of the panes, Quicksilver de- termines what items match and puts the top choice in the pane and additional, lower ranked matching items are shown in the results list . This happens for each pane so the results list will contain objects, actions, or arguments depending on which pane is selected. The results list above is showing the possible arguments that match the entered text Qui . The term item is used for something appearing in the results list, regardless of whether they are objects, actions or arguments. 8 Command % Option \x3 Control ç Shift 2nd Pane 3rd Pane Action Argument Results List 1st Pane Object Items Quicksilver User Manual 8 Plug-ins are optional modules that are installed which can add objects, actions or other capabili- ties to Quicksilver. You manage plug-ins entirely from within Quicksilver Preferences including finding, installing, updating, enabling, configuring and removing them. The Catalog is the list of objects that you can directly bring up in Quicksilver. Objects are not entered individually, instead you configure sources (in the Catalog Preferences) and Quicksilver scans and indexes them at regular intervals (by default every 10 minutes). For example, there is a source for Safari and from it, all your bookmarks and history are indexed into the catalog. Each of your bookmarks are objects to Quicksilver. So are your files and folders from your home directory, your contacts from Address Book, all the apps from your Applications directory, your albums from iPhoto, the songs from iTunes, and many other things (provided the appropriate plug-ins are installed). Note that some plug-ins allow Quicksilver to index things stored on web servers (such as del.icio.us bookmarks and backpack pages) and not merely things on the hard drive. A Preference pane shows all the actions that can be performed. All actions work on an object and actions are allowed based on the type of object selected. E.g., the Open URL action is only available for objects that are URLs. Actions that require an argument typically end in c& d and arguments are expected to be of a certain type. E.g., the Email to& actions expect the argu- ment to be an email address or contact. Some actions have a complementary action that reverse the object and argument type. E.g., you can enter the command c file , Email To&(Compose) , address d or the command c address , Email Item& (Compose) , file d. Notice the names of the actions are slightly different (To vs Item). Many (but not all) action names hint at the type of argument they take. Email To&. wants an address to follow. Email Item& wants some kind of item to send (text or a file). These email actions are so similarly named you might not have noticed they are different. In other cases ac- tions are so differently named you might not notice they are related. E.g., a pair of actions is used for searching web sites (like Google). You can enter a command as c site , Search For& , query d or c query , Find With& , site d. Complementary action pairs allow Quicksilver to adapt to how you think of commands. Then there are commands like Make New& which have no com- plement and don 9t hint at what their argument type is. Hopefully this manual helps explain them. Interfaces are configurable skins that affect the appearance of Quicksilver. They are installed as plug-ins and can be configured from the Appearance Preference pane. The default interface is called Primer. A very popular interface called Bezel is used throughout this manual. Quicksilver User Manual 9 When you use Quicksilver you type to select the objects, actions and arguments of commands. As you type, your choices are filtered down from all possible choices to only those that match what you 9ve typed (which are shown in the re- sults list). The matching method is one of the strengths of Quicksilver. Matches can be by the beginning of the phrase (e.g., type Deskt for cDesktop d) or by the first letter of each word of the choice (e.g., BA for cBrowse Artists d which is an iTunes object). The more you use specific items (objects and actions) the more quickly they will be matched. After a few times, once you type Des Quicksilver will start guessing cDesktop d and if you do it enough, you might be able to choose it just by typing D . Some items have sub-items, e.g., folders have files, contacts have phone numbers and ad- dresses, musical artists have albums, etc. Usu- ally when an item has sub-items you 9ll see a > on the right side of the item in the results list. The way you select the sub-items is by typing ? or / . The object then changes to the top sub-item and the list shows the sub-item 9s peers. You can type to match one of them or use the arrows to scroll up and down. This is an easy way to navigate folder hierarchies, or any other hierarchies. Quicksilver 9s strength is that it can do so many different things and the matching algorithm and navigation techniques make getting at all those things easy. However, for those commands that you do all the time, there 9s an even faster way. You can configure triggers to execute specific commands when you type a HotKey or make a mouse gesture (a click, drag, moving to a corner of the screen, and various other things). Have a bookmark or a search you do all the time? Trig- gers are perfect for them. There are built-in triggers to control iTunes. Triggers can be invoked at anytime, without having to first activate Quicksilver (with \x3 -space). There is a type of object known as a proxy object which stands for other objects. E.g., the Cur- rent Web Page proxy object stands for the URL of the web page currently shown in Safari (though it should be the default browser). The Current Selection proxy object stands for the cur- rent selection in the currently running application. Proxy Objects allow triggers to become dy- namic, e.g., pasting the URL of the web page currently shown in the browser. Installation Download Quicksilver from the web site http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ or directly from http://getqs.com/ . If you 9re adventurous you can download pre-release development builds from http://getqs.com/dev/ . Open the .dmg file and it will mount the Quicksilver volume and automati- cally extract the Quicksilver.app. Drag it where you want, I put mine in ~/Applications/. Double-click Quicksilver.app to start it. When run the first time a setup process is run. You can rerun it later with the Run Setup button from the Application Preferences. After a welcome screen and a license screen, Quicksilver will scan your computer for applications and based on Quicksilver User Manual 10 what applications it finds, will recommend plug-ins to install. Check the plug-ins for all the applications you use regularly and click Continue. Next you can choose the HotKey to acti- vate the Quicksilver com- mand window and how often Quicksilver will scan your computer to keep its catalog updated (the de- fault is every 10 minutes and is a fine choice). This is followed by some basic usage instructions and then the setup closes and a Quicksilver command window (using the primer interface) appears. In spite of the instructions, first time users might be confused. While Quicksil- ver is running, there is no menu for it, no Dock icon and no indication it 9s there aside from the command window. If you close it and didn 9t read the instructions you might be a little lost. The Quicksilver.app is usually in /Applications/ or ~/Applications/. When first used, the following per user files and folders are created: " ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/ " Actions.plist - list of installed actions " Catalog.plist - the conNgured catalog sources " Mnemonics.plist - learned inputs, defaults and abbreviations " PlugIns.plist - the list of available plug-ins and how they are conNgured " Triggers.plist - the conNgured triggers " Caches/ - another cache folder " Indexes/ - folder of indexed items " PlugIns/ - installed plug-ins " Shelves/ - where items on the Shelf and clipboards are stored " Actions/ - not installed but create this folder to add scripts that implement actions " Templates/ - not installed but create this folder to use with the Make New& action " ~/Library/Preferences/com.blacktree.Quicksilver.plist - stores various preferences and internal state " ~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/ - stores various state in binary Nles To do a complete uninstall use the Uninstall Quicksilver button in the Application preferences, or remove the above files and folders. It can also be useful to move or rename these while trouble- Quicksilver User Manual 11 shooting a problem. If you are having trouble installing plug-ins check that the owner of ~/ Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/ is the current user and not System. If it 9s not, change it and restart Quicksilver. When Quicksilver starts it contacts hrwebservices.net to check for new versions. If you use something that monitors outgoing connections (e.g., Little Snitch) it might warn you about this. It 9s perfectly normal and benign. If you 9re curious hrwebservices, is HostRocket Web Services which hosts blacktree.com. Invoking Quicksilver Activating Quicksilver Now that Quicksilver is installed and running, how do you use it? The basic way is to activate the command window with the HotKey \x3 -space. When you type this the command window ap- pears, the first pane is active and you can type to select some item in your catalog. The HotKey key is configurable in the Command Preferences Pane under HotKey activation. Quicksilver defaulted to 8 -space for a long time and then in 10.4, Apple chose to use 8 -space for Spotllght. So Quicksilver changed its default to \x3 -space. If you look at older posts on the Web you 9ll often see 8 -space used to activate Quick- silver. Since I use Quicksilver a lot more often than Spotlight (and anything without 8 conflicts with Emacs), I use 8 -space for Quicksilver and % 8 -space for Spotlight (set in the Spotlight System Preference pane of OS X). Another ad- vantage is that many hot keys used after activating Quicksilver use 8 , so using the same modi- fier key is easier. For example, 8 , will open up Quicksilver 9s Preferences (as it will in most ap- plications). I find it easier to type 8 -space 8 , than \x3 -space 8 , because I don 9t have to change modifier keys. Quicksilver User Manual 12 Selecting Items Once you activate Quicksilver with \x3 -space, you type some characters of what you 9re looking for and it will appear in the first pane. If I 9m look- ing for the Address Book entry for my friend Ash- ish Larivee typing any of the following might se- lect it: ashish , ash , al , alari , or many other combinations of the letters. In fact Quicksilver keeps track of what you type and what you select and uses that past history to guess what you 9re looking for now. This means if I type a and pick Ashish 9s entry Quicksilver will start to guess that more often for a rather than cAddress Book d or cAdium d or other things that begin with ca d. Quicksilver uses what 9s known as a matching algorithm to order its choices, below it 9s dis- cussed in some detail including what you can do to help it guess more accurately. Note it 9s only used for items, actions are chosen from a fixed ranking you can configure in the Actions prefer- ences. In order to keep the top level catalog manage- able, you cannot select any item merely by typ- ing after activating Quicksilver (this is known as cat the top level d). E.g, you can 9t reach a song title from your music or the phone number of a contact. That 9s not to say Quicksilver can 9t get to these, you must navigate to these items by typing ? (or equivalently /) into the appropriate object (in these examples iTunes and the con- tact). Most items that you can ? into have a > at the far right in the results list. By default Quicksilver will show its other guesses for what you typed after a few seconds, you can then scroll through them by typing ? . This behavior can be changed in the Command Pref- erences under cShow other matches d where you can choose: Never, Immediately, or Delayed (the default). You can also configure the spacebar to behave like ? . Of course the ? keys works too but you can also navigate this list with \x3 N (next) and \x3 P (previous) and \x3 V (scroll down a screen) and % V (scroll up a screen). You might not have realized this but Quicksilver shows what matches what you typed in two dif- ferent ways. When first activated, Quicksilver will filter the whole catalog down to just the things that match what you typed. To be clear, the things that don 9t match what you typed, are removed from the results list. However if at some point you type ? or / to cgo into d an object, if you type you 9ll find that Quicksilver moves to (snaps to) the first item that matches what you typed alpha- betically. The non-matching items are not removed. This is most apparent when browsing the file system or your iTunes library. It 9s also evident when browsing a contact 9s information, if you type to find their work phone number, the other information is still displayed in the results list (which is convenient). Sometimes these behaviors are known as selection as opposed to nar - rowing . In a results list there 9s a gear menu in the top right of the window, from there you can choose these behaviors via the Search Modes sub-menu: " Filter Results - Filters the current results list. " Filter Catalog - Filters, but also includes the entire contents of the top-level catalog. Lasts un- til you type esc or activate Quicksilver again ( \x3 - space ). Quicksilver User Manual 13 " Snap to Best - scrolls the results list to the best match but doesn 9t remove non-matching items. If you mistype something, you can type the delete key or 8 X to clear the pane and start over. If you navigate to something via ? or / then these keys will still keep you in the current position but clear the search. To reset entirely so that you 9re using the top-level global catalog use the esc key. There 9s no way to delete just the last letter typed. In the Command preferences you can configure the cReset search after d time. This is how long between keystrokes Quicksilver waits before reseting the search. So if it 9s set to .85 seconds and it 9s been 1 second since you 9ve typed a key, if you type another one it will start the search over with that key. Combining Activation and Selection There are faster ways to use Quicksilver too. You can activate it and put something in one or more panes at the same time. Triggers let you define key sequences, mouse clicks, and mouse gestures that will activate Quicksilver and fill in some panes and even execute commands im- mediately. These are discussed in more detail below but it 9s worth describing two triggers now. If you look in the Triggers Preferences under Quicksilver you 9ll find two that have been predefined Command Window with Selection and Command Window in Text Mode . The first opens a command window with the current application 9s selection in the first pane. This is typically text, though for the Finder this is one or more selected files or folders. Some other applications like iPhoto and iTunes also allow their non-text selection to be brought into Quicksilver. The second trigger will bring the selection into the first pane but will put that pane into text-mode so you can edit it. Quicksilver installs two services available in other applications (look in the application 9s menu under Services and you 9ll see Quicksilver). The two services are Get Current Selection (Inter- nal) and Send to Quicksilver . The fact that there are two of them is a quirk of the implementa- tion, you can use either, but Send to Quicksilver is the one meant to be used from the menu. It activates Quicksilver and puts the application 9s current selection (typically text) into the first pane. The other service is the internal mechanism that enables 8 -esc and the Current Selec- tion proxy object (used in triggers). These basically accomplish the same thing as Send to Quicksilver . Apple 9s Front Row uses 8 -esc and this conflicts with the Quicksilver service. You can change the Quicksilver key binding in Quicksilver 9s Preferences, under Command, using the Alternate Services Menu Key setting. Or if you prefer, the Front Row shortcut can be changed in the Keyboard & Mouse system preferences in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Even if you uncheck it, Front Row still works with the Apple Remote. I have the Command Window with Selection trigger mentioned above assigned to 8 -esc. TODO: It 9s not clear if this is needed but if 8 -esc isn 9t working for you, make sure you have enabled advanced features and in the Catalog under Quicksilver check that Internal Commands is enabled. Yet another way to put the selection into the object pane is to activate Quicksilver and then type 8 G. This is slower than the other methods since you have to activate Quicksilver first, but since I learned it first, it 9s in my fingers, so I use it a lot. By default 8 G only puts the Finder 9s selection into the first pane. If you have advanced features enabled in the Application Preferences, then in the Extras Preferences checking cPull selection from front application instead of Finder d will make 8 G behave just like 8 -esc, using the same mechanism. If Quicksilver is already running, clicking on the Quicksilver.app icon will bring up the command window. If you drag and drop something onto the icon it will be selected in the first pane. This is convenient if Quicksilver is in your Dock, but people also put it in the Finder 9s sidebar or toolbar. Quicksilver User Manual 14 This is particularly useful if you hide your Dock and use Finder windows often (I find the more I use Quicksilver, the less I use the Finder). There are other, less obvious ways to select something in a Quicksilver command window pane. As discussed above you can type 8 G to choose the Finder 9s selection (or possibly the selection of the frontmost application). You can also paste something into the pane with the standard key binding 8 V and you can drag and drop something into a pane as well (you need to start the drag before invoking Quicksilver). You can select the last object used by typing 8 [ after activating Quicksilver. In fact it recalls the entire last command, that is the object, action and argument used. Unfortunately as of B51 it toggles between the last command and the current one and you can 9t select earlier ones by typ- ing 8 [ again. Immediate Execution You can create triggers that perform an entire command, like open an application or anything else. Triggers are great but they require you to pre-configure them. You can also perform a command by holding down the key you use to select a subject or action. For example, if you type ad to select Adium.app and hold down the d then Quicksilver will execute the default ac- tioni which should be Open . As described above, for me typing a will default to the Address Book contact for my friend Ashish. I can activate Quicksilver and hold down a to open an email message (the default action for a contact) addressed to her. This trick also works for actions. If you hold down the last key you type to select an action it will execute it. So I can select Ashish in the first pane, tab to the second and hold down e to use the Edit Contact action. This method is a little risky if you don 9t know what the action will be, but if you do it 9s a little faster and there 9s no trigger configuration needed. It 9s less risky when you real- ize you can configure the ranking of actions in the Actions preference pane. To make it faster you can type the letter with the ç 8 modifiers from the first pane. So to edit Ashish 9s contact entry I would activate Quicksilver, type a to bring up her entry and then type ç 8 E to have Quicksilver execute the command. This only allows you to use one letter to iden- tify the action and has the same risk that you have to know what action will be run, but if you do, it can be convenient. TODO: holding down Tab in first pane will execute the command. Holding down right-arrow or / when navigating will too. The Comma Trick A less obvious feature is known as the comma trick. Using the comma key, you can select mul- tiple items in the object pane (or the third pane) and then have a single action operate on all of them at the same time. Using this you can move several files to the trash at once or address a new mail message to several different people. Activate Quicksilver, select an item, type , (comma) and then select another item. You 9ll see a collection of smaller icons accumulate at the bottom or left of the object pane depending on the interface used (the menu interface does not support the comma trick). You can select as many items as you want. When you have them all, tab to the action pane and continue as normal. If you have several collected you can type the delete key to remove the last item collected (i.e., the last small icon). Quicksilver User Manual 15 Another way to select multiple items is with 8 A. It will select all the items in the results list as if you had used the comma trick for all of them. If your results list is long this can take a long time. It 9s most useful if you navigate to a folder with a small number of items that you want to operate on (e.g., deleting, moving, or tagging them all). Helping the Matching Algorithm Quicksilver learns what you do (and makes that easier to do) because of its matching algorithm. It remembers what commands you execute and what you did to call them up, do them a few times and they get easier to call up. However if you do things that are similarly named it con- fuses Quicksilver and it won 9t guess as quickly as it could. Fortunately you can teach it. Trig- gers, described above, are the fastest way to do things in Quicksilver, but there are only so many keystrokes you can remember. Here are some other techniques you can use. If you activate Quicksilver and start typing into the object pane you 9ll see a results list appear of items that match what you 9ve typed. The order of the items is known as their rank . The first item is ranked 1 the second is ranked 2, etc. For ob- jects, the rank is determined based on the score of the items. Score is computed based on how well an item matches what you typed. Theoretically, items move to second place rank the first time they are used to match some input. The second time they are used they get ranked first. The circle to the left of the item indicates how well the item matches the typed input. The darker the circle, the stronger the match (i.e., the higher the score). You can manually adjust the score of an item by \x3 -clicking on it to bring up a menu of choices. If you choose cSet as Default for& d then the se- lected item will match if you type the same input again. You can undo an abbreviation by choosing Decrease Score in the menu. Setting a default works for what you 9ve typed, but say you want to set as a default something that is mid-way in a very long list that you don 9t want to scroll through. As an example say you want z to bring up your Amazon bookmark and that if you type z, Amazon is further down the list than you want to look. In that case, use the Assign Abbreviation action (you need to have advanced features enabled). Bring up the object you want in the first pane ( www.amazon.com ), choose Assign Abbreviation as the action, and in the third pane enter the abbreviation you want via text mode ( z ). Now if you type that abbrevia- tion in either the first or third pane, your choice will be ranked first. This happens because ex- actly matching an abbreviation causes the item to have a very high score. Note abbreviations will only work if they match the input string in some way. The user \x3 -clicked on the 4th item in the results list after typing Des . The pop-up menu shows the item 9s score, 95 and the option to set it as the default for Des . Quicksilver User Manual 16 You can 9t set irc to be an abbreviation for Colloquy.app because if you typed irc , Colloquy would not appear in the results list. Say you don 9t use Activity Monitor often and when you want it you can never remember its name but you think of the word cprocesses d. Quicksilver doesn 9t help here since it doesn 9t relate cprocesses d to Activity Monitor, and as a result Abbreviations don 9t work for this. TODO: (this doesn 9t work) But you can use Finder aliases. Find the Activity Monitor.app in /Applications/Utilities/ and create an alias for it called Processes.app. Put the alias someplace that Quicksilver will index it. Now if you type processes quicksilver will sug- gest your new alias. The above is all for objects in the first and third panes. Actions in the second pane work a little differently. Actions have no score, their rank is statically determined by their order in the Actions Preferences. You can manually change the order by dragging and dropping them (for this to work you must sort by the Rank column). TextMate Ranker You can also choose a slightly different matching algorithm by installing the TextMate Ranker (+) plug-in (which requires advanced features to be enabled) and selecting it as the String Ranker handler in Preferences. It makes two changes to the algorithm. The first is that it favors more beginning of word letters that are touched. E.g., if you type AM it will match Activity Monitor over Adium since two begin- ning of word letters are matched instead of just one. The second difference is that it favors input that matches a higher percentage of the words. So the input AM will favor Activity Monitor over Audio MIDI Setup since 2/2 (100%) of words are matched instead of 2/3 (67%). As a result, if you 9re the type to favor typing acronyms over continuous letters in the name of something, you 9ll probably prefer the TextMate Ranker. However there are reported problems with matching things in the third pane such as when you use the Open With& action or the Email to& action. You may find that no results match in the third pane. Quicksilver User Manual 17 Part II - Configuration Configuration Quicksilver has a configuration window that provides access to the Guide, Preferences, Trig- gers, Catalog and Plug-Ins. These can be accessed several ways: 1. This is the way I usually do it, after activating Quicksilver (with \x3 - space) use the standard shortcut 8 , to bring up preferences or use one of these other shortcuts: 2. In the main command window select one of the Internal Com- mands: QS Preferences, QS Triggers, QS Catalog and use the Run action. 3. Click the Quicksilver Dock icon and Quicksilver's menu appears, look under Quicksilver 4. If the menu bar icon is en- abled, a menu is available by clicking on it 5. Right-click the Quick- silver icon in the Dock The following sections describe these preferences. First global preferences that affect how Quicksilver is activated and appears and then sections on Plug-Ins, the Catalog, Actions, Han- dlers, and Notifications. Triggers are a large topic and are covered in their own entire section immediately after this one. 8 ? Open Guide 8 , Open Preferences 8 ; Open Catalog 8 9 Open Triggers 8 d Open Plug-ins Quicksilver User Manual 18 Adding new Quicksilver features is usually done by installing the relevant plug-in. Sometimes there are additional things to configure such as enabling new catalog sources, new actions (un- der Preferences, Actions) or relevant Handlers (under Preferences, Handers). Finally some plug-ins add their own preference panels listed in the lower left area of the Preferences window. Preferences Quicksilver 9s Preferences are divided into sets at the left of the window. Those listed at the top are built-in to Quicksilver and those in the bottom section are enabled by installed plug-ins (ex- cept for Actions and Handlers which really should be in the top). The Application Prefer- ences control the most fundamental aspects of Quicksilver as an applica- tion. cStart at login d and cWarn before quitting d are recommended. The next two preferences require a restart before they take effect, this is what the small circle with a line icon indicates. The easy way to restart is to activate Quicksilver ( \x3 -space) and then type \x3 8 Q There are many features described in this manual that say you must enable advanced features. To do so check the third prefer- ence shown. After restart you 9ll see the cExtras d Preferences set shown in the image and described below. I recommend you enable Advanced features as a lot of useful plug-ins require it (those are indicated with a + symbol in their name). These aren 9t necessarily unstable (as those plug-ins marked ² usually are). The cShow icon in dock d preference will let you not waste Dock space with Quicksilver. If you disable this, Quicksilver runs as a background process. This means it won 9t appear in the Dock or when switching apps with 8 -tab and the main Quicksilver menu will not appear while the preference window is open. I tend to keep it in the Dock so that it 9s easy to restart if Quicksilver crashes. The cShow icon in menu bar d preference puts an indicator in the top right part of the screen, some people like this, particularly if they don 9t configure a Dock icon or have their Dock hidden. It provides a simplified menu to access the various configuration panes of Quicksilver. If you want it to provide the full menu options (via more sub-menus) set the option cInclude access to full contents of menu bar d. The popup allows you to configure the menubar icon on the left, right side of the menubar or cNormal d lets you configure it as any other menubar item, Quicksilver User Manual 19 The bottom half allows you to configure if Quicksilver checks its website automatically for up- dates. You can specify if it should automatically download updates and whether or not they should be installed automatically. Some betas have had some problems if installed this way. Usually a manual download of a new version from the Quicksilver website will solve any prob- lems. The three buttons at the bottom will rerun the installation setup described in the Installation sec- tion, Reset Quicksilver 9s preferences, and completely Uninstall Quicksilver. The Appearance Prefer- ences control how Quick- silver looks. The first three options all have the trade off of being a little prettier at the cost of some per- formance. Enable them if your machine can handle it, if you 9re finding Quick- silver a bit sluggish try dis- abling them. The Superfluous visual effects vary per interface but include the command window unzipping open and fading closed. Normally Quicksilver doesn 9t load all the icons of items in the results sets, the second option changes this behavior. The cLoad Previews d option is similar to the cShow icon preview d in the Finder 9s View Op- tions. It will display a thumbnail image of a file or other item in a pane in the command window. The Command Interface preference is how you choose the interface (aka skin or theme) Quick- silver uses for the main Command window. The popup is filled with choices based on the Inter- face plug-ins installed. See the Interface section below for details. The default interface is Primer and it shows a little more context information than other interfaces so it 9s recommended for new users. The Bezel interface is very popular and is shown throughout this manual. The next section shows all the available interfaces. The various controls below the interface selec- tion allow you to further customize the appearance of the interface and vary per interface. The column headers have tooltips showing what they represent: Background, Selection & Accents, and Text colors. Clicking on the nine colors in the grid will bring up a color picker. Quicksilver User Manual 20 The Command Prefer- ences allows configuration of the command window 9s behavior. The top of the pane affects how you activate Quicksil- ver. The HotKey Activation is the basic way to activate Quicksilver. The default is to type \x3 -space, though as shown a common alter- native (described in Invok - ing Quicksilver ) is to use 8 -space and to remap Spotlight to something else via the Spotlight Sys- tem Preferences. cModifier-only Activation d allows you to activate Quicksilver by single or double presses of modifier keys such as 8 , % , \x3 , ç or even fn on a laptop. Some applications can call for secure text entry and this can interfere with modifier only activiation. If you use Visor and a double shift modifer isn 9t working for you, open Terminal.app and in the File menu enable cSecure Keyboard Entry d. There have also been reports that Quicken Scheduler app that runs in the background as a login item to do scheduled downloads can also interfere with modifier only activation. cHide if pressed when already visible d affects what happens if you activate Quicksilver when it 9s already active. Regardless of the setting of this option, typing esc will close the command win- dow. The cAlternative Services Menu Key d is how to change the shortcut assigned to the Quicksilver service Get Current Selection. The default value is 8 - esc , so you might want to change it if you use Front Row as described above in Invoking Quicksilver . The bottom of the Command Preferences pane affects how the results list window appears. You can specify the Row Height in pixels. A higher value will show a larger image on each row. A lower value will result in a single line per entry. The info displayed in the 2nd line for the selected entry will be shown in the bottom of the window. Quicksilver User Manual 21 Selecting cShow children split view d will split the results list vertically into two col- umns, the right one showing the contents of the selected item in the left one (much like the column view of the Finder). You must restart Quicksilver for changes to this setting to take effect. When first en- abled you 9ll only see one column, but no- tice the small dot in the middle of the right edge, you can click on and drag that to the left to reveal the second column. cShow other matches d controls if the re- sults list appears after you type into the command window immediately, after a short delay or not until you type ? . By virtue of Quicksilver 9s matching algorithm, the spacebar isn 9t particularly useful in the command window. The cSpacebar behavior d preference lets you reclaim that key to make Quicksilver a little faster to use. You can configure it to: " Select Next Result - select the next result in the results list, like typing ? " Jump to Argument List - change to the third pane " Switch to text mode - change the current pane to text mode entry, like typing . or 8 " Show Item 9s Contents - goes into the item, like typing ? or / cSwitch to text mode if no match is found d will allow you to save typing . or 8 to enter text mode in a pane. cReset search after d lets you configure how much of a pause in typing into the com- mand will start a new search as opposed to appending to the existing search. The Extras Preferences are only available if Ad- vanced features are en- abled in the Application Preferences. cApplication Update Type d allows you to choose be- tween Prerelease Candi- dates and Final Releases when Quicksilver checks for updates as configured in the Application Prefer- ences. Sometimes after installation this is set to a blank value and that has been observed to cause problems, make sure it 9s set to some value in the popup. cApplication reopen behav- ior d configures what hap- pens if you use the Open action on an application that is already running. Quicksilver User Manual 22 You can have it activate the application, show the front window or show all windows. Since the matching algorithm is case-insensitive the shift key is available for some use in Quicksilver. If you check cCapitalize Key modifies action in command window c then shifted let- ters are used to select the action, eliminating the need to tab to the second pane. Once moved to the action pane, unshifted letters don 9t change the first pane, all typing counts for the second pane. If you also hold down the 8 key the action will be performed immediately, no need to type return . E.g., ç I selects the action for i (perhaps IM ) while ç 8 I performs the action for i. Use caution as it 9s not always clear which action is invoked. If you prefer concentrating on one thing at a time, check cHide other applications when switch- ing d so that Quicksilver will do a cHide Others d after switching applications. You can prevent the hiding behavior by holding down the shift key when completing the command. There have been problems reported with this feature that applications no longer appear when doing 8 - tab . Normally 8 G will take the Finder 9s selection and put it into Quicksilver. By checking the cPull selection from front application instead of Finder d option, it will use the same mechanism as 8 - esc and will pull the selection from whatever the active application is. See more details at Invok - ing Quicksilver . Checking cRun tasks in background d will do just that. E.g., if you use the Compress action it does the compressing in the background allowing you to do other things with Quicksilver imme- diately. However as of B51 some have reported some instability from using this option. E.g., some have reported that running the Compress action via a trigger with this option checked causes Quicksilver to hang during the compression. Quicksilver has a small window that shows current status known as the Task Viewer. You can bring it up by activating Quicksilver ( \x3 -space) and typing 8 K. Most people don 9t use it. You can also check the cShow Task Viewer Automatically d option to have it appear when Quicksilver is performing tasks such as refreshing the catalog. There 9s an image of it in the Catalog section below. If you enable cSuppress HotKeys while command window is open d then HotKey triggers will not work while Quicksilver is activated (i.e., the command window is open). I have no idea why you would want to enable this. Interfaces Interface plug-ins change the look of Quicksilver 9s command window. Install them just like other plug-ins from the Plug-Ins Preferences. Then select one of the installed interfaces in the Ap- pearance Preference pane using the Command Interface popup. If you use a program like VNC to connect to different machines, you might want to configure them with different interfaces or change the colors on the interface to distinguish them. The following screenshots show each of the six interfaces at full size so for comparison pur- poses. These are all the official interfaces available from the Plug-Ins Preferences. Julius Eckert has created several Quicksilver interfaces of his own that many people like (I had some stability problems when I tried them but that might be corrected now.) They are available here , download the plugin and double-click them to install them, the select them from the Appearance Prefer- ence pane like any other interface. Quicksilver User Manual 23 " Primer - The default interface is large and provides more info to help you learn " Window - Like Primer but smaller and with less info " Mini - Like Primer and Window but even smaller Quicksilver User Manual 24 " Bezel - Grey, horizontal panes. Very popular (used in this manual at reduced size) " Flashlight - Looks like Spotlight and appears in top left corner of the screen " Menu - Fills the OS X menu bar with input panes, doesn 9t support the comma trick . " Cube - A single square pane that rotates as you tab between the panes. Shown above are the first and third sides of the cube on this one command. Note that the order of the command parts (object, action, argument) changes on each side. It 9s very slick seeing it rotate. Quicksilver User Manual 25 Plug-ins Quicksilver is designed with a central core that implements some basic functionality but most of the features are implemented in plug-ins. You can pick and choose which plug-in functionality you want, but must install the plug-ins before that functionality is available. Managing the plug- ins including finding, installing, enabling, and removing is done entirely from within Quicksilver in the Plug-ins Preferences (though additional configuration in Preferences or the Catalog may be useful or necessary). You can bring it up from the menu or by activating Quicksilver and typing 8 d. The plug-ins are shown in the right pane, with a checkbox showing if they are enabled, a column showing the version num- ber (which follow no con- sistent pattern) and the date the plug-in was last updated. The left panel shows sets of plug-ins: " Recommended - rec- ommended for you based on a scan of what applications are installed in the machine. " Installed Plug-ins - those plug-ins that are installed in ~/Library/ Application Support/ Quicksilver/PlugIns/. Only those that are checked are enabled, those not checked are in- stalled, but disabled. " All Plug-ins - all available plug-ins from the quicksilver.blacktree.com server. Checked plug- ins are installed and enabled, unchecked plug-ins are not installed. % -click on this to show some hidden built-in plug-ins like Core Support and E-mail Support. " Categories - shows plug-ins collected into relevant categories by feature. Plug-ins can be in more than one category. Otherwise behaves like All Plug-ins, checked plug-ins are installed and enabled, unchecked plug-ins are not installed. Checking a plug-in will enable it, downloading and installing it if necessary. Selecting a plug-in and clicking the button will open a drawer with (usually limited) information about what the plug-in does. Selecting one or more plug-ins and clicking the button opens a pop-up menu of things you can do to plug-ins including install, download, copy, and de- lete. Delete is the only one you 9ll typically use from this menu. The last three items in the menu are options you can enable or not. The button will refresh the list of plug-ins from quicksilver.blacktree.com. Quicksilver User Manual 26 To disable a plug-in, uncheck it. Its features will no longer be available but its code will still be loaded into memory. To clean up this memory (possibly fixing stability issues), restart Quicksil- ver. The plug-in is still installed on disk (so it will appear unchecked in the Installed Plug-ins view) until it is deleted. So, to uninstall a plug-in, select it from the list and choose the Delete Selected Plug-ins option from the menu. If you expect to see a plug-in in the list and don 9t, try refreshing the list of plug-ins. Note that some plug-ins are only visible if Advanced features are enabled. Usually these plug-ins have names that end in (+). Plug-ins that end in ( ² ) should be considered to be of beta quality. If you 9re having problems installing plug-ins check the ownership and permissions on ~/Library/ Application Support/Quicksilver/PlugIns/ and its parent directory. Use the Finder 9s Get Info command (from the File menu) to see the Ownership & Permissions of a folder. It should be owned by you and you should have permission to read and write it. Usually quitting Quicksilver and removing (or moving) the PlugIns folder or its parent Quicksilver folder and restarting Quicksilver (allowing it to recreate the folder) will solve any problems. Of course removing the Quicksilver folder will remove any customizations you 9ve made. Some people have reported that using the Little Snitch network monitor interferes with Quicksil- ver 9s ability to download plug-ins. If your plug-in list is empty and you run Little Snitch, try dis- abling it. Catalog The Catalog is the collection of items indexed by Quicksilver during its periodic scans. You populate it by configuring catalog sources which Quicksilver periodically indexes. This is done in the Catalog panel. You can bring it up from the menu or by activating Quicksilver and typing 8 ;. Catalog sources are con- Ngured into sets shown in the left panel. Most are pre-conNgured by various plug-ins and many plug-ins add sources to the Mod- ules set. The checkbox enables or disables the source. Enabled sources that have been indexed show the number of items found. Note that some sources (such as Proxy Objects in the Quicksilver set) require advanced fea- tures to be enabled in the Application Preferences and not all sources are enabled by default after plug-ins are installed. Quicksilver User Manual 27 At the bottom of the window you can conNgure how frequently Quicksilver rescans the catalog sources to Nnd (and remove) items. The default is 10 minutes. The button will manually rescan a selected catalog source. You can manually rescan the whole catalog with the Rescan Catalog command in the Quicksilver menu (only if you have the Dock icon visible) or more conveniently by typing 8 R after activating Quicksilver. Some interfaces (e.g., Bezel) will show a progress icon while rescanning the catalog. You can also configure the Task Viewer to show automatically during a catalog rescan. Show the Task Viewer by selecting it from the Window menu (if the Quicksilver Dock icon is enabled) or by typing 8 K after activating Quicksilver. The gear menu in the top right (which is there even if it 9s not visible in some interfaces) will let you configure two options: Show Automatically and Resize Automatically. The Task Viewer isn 9t all that useful as things usually just work. It could be used to notice when Quicksilver is doing rescans or perhaps to help troubleshoot a slow catalog source (if you 9ve configured a file scan to be too deep). With a source selected click on the button to show a drawer with three tabs. Shown below are the tabs for the Desktop source selected in the above image.: " Source Options - varies based on the kind of source. A Nle source (shown) allows you to con- Ngure depth of scan and Nle types to be included, see below for details. This is shown greyed out since the Desktop source is not conNgurable. " Contents - the list of all items found by indexing this source. You can remove a speciNc item by unchecking it " Attributes - provides some info about the source and allows you to enable it and change the name. Include in Global Catalog is whether the source is enabled or not and is the same as the checkbox in the main Catalog panel. PredeNned sources have a Create Copy button that will duplicate the source in the Custom catalog set, allowing you to change the source options. To find out what catalog source an object comes from, bring up the object in the first pane and use the Show Source in Catalog action; the Catalog window will open with the source of the object selected. If the catalog contains unwanted items, this is a way to track down what sources you want to modify or remove. Quicksilver User Manual 28 Using the + and - buttons in the Custom set you can add and remove additional catalog sources. You can also cre- ate custom sources via the Create Copy button in the At- tributes tab of pre-defined sources. The + button will show a drop down menu of various source types (aka scan- ners) which varies based on the plug-ins installed. Shown at the right are all available scanners. Note that some plug-ins install catalog sources in the Modules set and others install new scanner types. When trying to deter- mine what a new plug-in does, remember to check both places (or read this manual). The File & Folder Scanner lets you add folders to scan into the catalog. You can also just drag folders into the main catalog pane to add a source. A common thing to want to do is to scan the ~/Documents/ folder deeper than the depth of 2 the default source uses (in the User set). To do this, select the Users set and the Documents source, open the drawer and select the Attributes tab. Click on Create Copy to create a new source in Custom named Documents. The difference is that the Source Options tab of it is editable. Change the depth slider to what you want, I have mine at 3. Many people just select infinity but that 9s probably not what you want. Your indexes will take longer and your catalog will be huge which will slow Quicksilver down. Also if you have many extra items in your catalog your searches are more likely to have extraneous results. Remember that you can always navigate to any file in Quicksilver (see the Files and Folders section) so all you need in your catalog are your more commonly used files. Also you probably don 9t want to just index your entire home directory. ~/Library has many preference and cache files that you don 9t want indexed and the Music and Pictures folders are better served by the iTunes and iPhoto plug-ins and their catalog sources. The File & Folder Scanner can also scan the contents of files to add to the catalog. The scanner can recognize either HTML links or text lines depend- ing on the setting of the Include Contents popup. The Applications set has 4 sources defined. The Applications (User) source indexes ~/ Applications/ to a depth of 3 but also only finds the applica- tions, not the intervening folders. I want those in the catalog so that I can easily move an application into them (e.g., ~/ Applications/Games/ and ~/Application/Browsers/). The Types field in the Source Options tab is what 9s useful for this. If you type file extensions (e.g., .txt, .c, .doc, etc.) into it you can filter the kinds of files indexed. You can also enter Mac Type Codes surrounded by single quotes and type tab to have it inter- preted. So, to get applications entered as it is in the pre- configured source, enter 'APPL' (including the single quotes). In this example I want folders, so I enter 8fold 9 and type tab and it 9s replaced with cfolder d. I choose a depth of 1 to include my Games and Browsers folders but not folders that some applications come with (or the Contents folders inside the .app packages) . TODO: Some Type Codes are listed here . Note that the Find All Applications source under the Applica- tions set will search the whole system for application packages. It also indexes any external drives connected. Some people complain that when connecting drives to their machine the drives spin up. To prevent Quicksilver from causing this, uncheck the Find All Applications cata- log source. Quicksilver User Manual 29 The QSSpotlightObjectSource allows you to specify a Spotlight query to find items to add to the catalog. See Apple 9s documentation for Spotlight 9s Query Expression Syntax and Common Me - tadata Attribute Keys . Unfortunately in B51 this is buggy. It 9s difficult to get one of these sources to scan and it sometimes goes into a loop continuously rescanning and using l

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