Long live Harry Nilsson.

Great buttery goodness, Batman! Now, using QS to view my various @nextactions lists I’ll increase my productivity, I dunno, a gazillion percent.

Honestly, the one thing I’m most looking forward to in Tiger (os X 10.4), or am tempted for in Konfabulator, is the ability to have my lists available in a keystroke. This solves it. And to think I’ve had QS installed for months and never knew. Brilliant.

Honestly, the one thing I’m most looking forward to in Tiger (os X 10.4), or am tempted for in Konfabulator, is the ability to have my lists available in a keystroke.

Dunno if this is what you have in mind exactly, but you might consider assigning your list a trigger. Invoke QS and hit Command-apostrophe and you’ll have the ability to create a global key command for anything you can do in QS—in this case opening yr TODO list.

Does that help?

Excellent. I can’t believe I never found this before. By the way, that Carparts song by the Long Winters is great!

Actually, the global hot key I was looking for is QS. Now that I can hit cmd-space, pop open my plaintext todo, and view the list all in QS, I’m in pig-heaven. I can already append items through QS; if only I could cross off completed items.

My point is that I don’t need Konfab or 10.4 right now, because QS does it already.

That’s good stuff. You forgot to mention though, that for the iPhoto and iTunes goodness one has to install the appropriate plugins. In case people are wondering why it doesn’t work for them :)

That’s true, Wolfgang. Thanks.

You can also combine these hints for even cooler tricks: Select a text file and hit right-arrow to see the lines of the file. THEN start typing again and watch as Qs filters the lines of the file, just like you’re searching through the catalog. This does depend on the Search Mode setting in the gear in the top-right corner of the results list, Set it to one of the Filter settings instead of Snap.

@Tim: I need to spend more time with the Filter modes. That seems like powerful stuff. Good tip.

Quicksilver is the best application ever written.

Thanks again, Merlin. Once again you have explicitly illustrated functionality that I haven’t taken the time to find for myself.

Keeps me coming back.

Peace, Mann.

Which plugin is required to get the list view of a text file? What defines a text fiile? The suffix or type and creator code?

Cheers,

Dave

You missed opt-rightarrow into arbitrary folders to show hidden items.

Also, the beauty of Search Contents is when you make a trigger for Search Contents of Browse Artists. Then you get a trigger that pops up your iTunes artists for quick iTunes playing goodness!

Oh, and plugins can create new children for applications. For example, my Colloquy plugin adds all known servers (from connections prefs and favorites) as children to Colloquy. And for apps without explicit children and use the standard Cocoa recent documents prefs, right-arrow will show all recent documents.

@Dave: I think the text stuff is baked in as long as you’re using the latest version. You may need to also flip on “Beta” functionality in the Preferences. That’s where all the good stuff hides, and it’s usually quite reliable.

You can save a few keystrokes and search tracks by doing cmd-spacebar, typing br (browse tracks will be the matching action), hit enter, then type the name of the track you want.

great tricks. keep that good work

Quicksilver has changed the way that I work on my Mac. First, I changed the shortcut key to F15 (why use two keys when I can use one?). Second, I totally emptied out the Dock, reduced its size, and now I use it solely as a process viewer.

I hardly ever use the Finder anymore, as QS allows me to easily open any file that I want. The Finder is now mainly used to move and rename files.

@Jeff F: My setup exactly. Except that I use Shift as I have two, they are long keys hence easy to press fast, and Shift is an inferior modifier. QS = dock liberation…

small icons in the drop-down list? i can’t seem to find a setting for that. Can someone point me in the right direction?

@Adam: Preferences > Command > Row Height

@Merlin: Thanks! That is just what I was looking for.

Am I the only one who finds QS capricious and frustrating? I am tremendously excited by it, but I find it almost never does things the way I expect it to (starting with the interface being often invisible on my screen, but that seems to have gone away since I checked “Superfluous visual effects”). For instance, I find it awkward, inconsistent, and see no reason to go from “Browse Tracks” to “Search Contents” in order to browse the iTunes tracks. Why doesn’t browsing in the Browse Window work with iTunes tracks? I cannot use QS for more than 3 minutes without finding something like this.

It seems that my confusion almost always comes from not understanding the functional distinction between the Bezel searches and the Browse Window searches, and not knowing what is being searched. Why can’t I invoke QS, type “itu” to select the iTunes application, press , and type “browk” to select “Browse Tracks”, press , type “Sult” to jump to “Sultans of Swing”, and press enter to play? Instead I have to type “itu”, wait for the drop-down list, right-arrow, press down-arrow five times to select “Browse Tracks” (typing at this point replaces the “iTunes app” found in the initial search), press , press to run the default “Search Contents” (at which point the two panel interface is unexpectedly cleared with no notice that it is continuing the last operation), type “Sult”, press , and press to play.

I’d say 2/3 to 3/4 of my keystrokes using QS are wasted or misguided, and 1/3 of the time I end up doing what I wanted “the old fashioned way”. I want QS to work, but the inconsistancy and lack of location feedback is driving me nuts. What am I missing?

Kriekira - I agree that the iTunes plugin can be a little obtuse. Have you considered making a trigger to drop you straight into the clean window after you do the “Search Contents” action? Bind it to something similar to your QS hotkey that you can hit easily.

I actually tried this last night after reading your comment (while writing my tutorial) and found it to be perfect for a iTunes-specific QS.

Quicksilver can definitely be challenging, but the more you play with it, the more accustomed to it you become and you can start patching together longer and longer chains that do exactly what you need.

Arian Byw

Arian Byw…