I give up. How do you get “QS Triggers” to appear in the “Select an item” portion of the new trigger pane? I’m running Beta 48 Boxer (3758) under OS X 10.4.5. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Like Dan Dickinson, I’ve got my F-keys set up to launch my browser/email/IM/iTunes/kGTD, but what I’ve found really handy is to set up these triggers to run a crude AppleScript that checks the visibility of the app and toggles it, giving me a “Dashboard”-like show/hide toggle for all my most-used apps. Particularly handy for smaller displays where managing a bunch of windows is a pain.

If anyone’s interested, the AppleScripts looks like this (my knowledge of AppleScript is just pathetic — glaring infractions against the Don’t Repeat Yourself rule of thumb here):

tell application "Finder"    if (exists of process "iTunes") is true then      if frontmost of process "iTunes" is true then        set visible of process "iTunes" to false      else        activate application "iTunes"      end if    else      activate application "iTunes"    end if end tell

I love the idea of a “Current Selection” trigger, but am having serious problems getting it to work. Setting up the Current Selection trigger as Dan describes it puts Quicksilver into a tailspin. QS doesn’t activate for several seconds; then when it does pop up, it immediately vanishes again (stealing focus from my active app in the process). I have to hit Cmd-Space once again to get QS back up. So my QS hotkey has effectively become Cmd-Space-Space. After this happens once, it keeps happening EVERY TIME I activate QS, until I quit and relaunch it.

I know this is more appropriate for the QS forums, but until they’re back, this seems like the next best place.

“The shelf in Quicksilver is kind of a mystery meat location to lots of people” Well you’re right about that one. I decided to check it out and went into the prefs to look for it - and it took quite some time before I realized it was a plugin I had to install :)

I use clipboard/shelf triggers alot (coincidentally with almost exactly the same key-combination that use use), but find it more useful to have the trigger bring up “search contents.” That way if I need an item far down the list, I still won’t need to leave the keyboard.

Sorry if this is off-topic - what’s up with the blacktree forums? I haven’t been able to get access to the blacktree bugs or forums page for about a week now. Everytime I try http://forums.blacktree.com/ I get asked to “Enter username and password for “Temporarily Disabled” at forums.blacktree.com” Is anyone else seeing this at the moment?

@Dan — Here you go: Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog: Blacktree Goes Dark

Blacktree.com was suspended today due to it overloading the database on Alcor’s host. He is investigating solutions, but he’s a little busy with school projects right now to handle it.

So hang in there, Quicksilver users - it’ll be back soon.

I’m pretty sure the triggers preference pane is already mapped to cmd-’ (apostrophe) by default once you’re in Quicksilver - so I hit cmd-[space] then cmd-’ to define a new trigger.

Or am I missing something?

Or am I missing something?

No, that’s accurate as such, but a) you’d need to be in QS already to hit cmd-apostrophe (I believe that’s the global OS X cmd for an app’s “Preferences”) and b) you’d still need to click on the “Triggers” sub section.

The (meta)trigger I use can be struck from anyplace outside QS and it instantly takes you directly to the the triggers panel. Might be overkill, but when you’re first setting these things up, it’s nice to know you can make a new one as quickly as it occurs to you with as little disruption as possible.

pardon silly q’n: i see ‘clipboard storage’…but not ‘clipboard history’…?

sorry, let me clarify. i’ve turned on stuff that dan says to turn on, so i can find “clipboard storage” when i create a new trigger…but, oddly, not clipboard history, which is much more useful…. thoughts?

Wow, a trigger call-out. This could get ugly!

Dan J H - the forums are down due to Blacktree overloading the SQL database of their hosting company. They’ll be back in the near future, don’t worry.

Anyhow, triggers:

Visible Applications (Show Radial Menu) - single click, upper right corner of the display. Gives you a nice quarter-circle radial menu for your open and active apps.

Current Selection (Large Type) - Ctrl-Command-Keypad[+]. Great for when someone is standing over my shoulder asking me for a phone number or other information, so I can blow it up to obnoxious size immediately.

Current Selection (Email To… (Compose)) - I bind this to the same function key I use for my mail app, but with a modifier. Hit the trigger, type a few letters of the contact I want to mail, hit return, and it automatically attaches the file.

Current Application (Hide Others) - enter top left corner for .5s; this helps me focus on just one app.

Other than that, it’s mostly apps (I’ve been doing browser/email/IM/MP3 on F1-F4 for as long as I’ve been on OS X), bookmarks (ctrl-opt-command-P for our departmental phone list, which I have to reference a lot) and the iTunes scripts.

Oh, and Merlin: 4 keypresses to get to the trigger prefs? Pshaw, my friend - invoke, then Command-single quote (‘) brings up the trigger prefs. If you invoke using command-space, you can just hold command and tap space then quote. And that’s built in, so you don’t need to set up a trigger for it. (Just don’t do it too fast, or it goes into text entry mode.)

(The fact that at least two of the points I made in that last mammoth comment were beaten to death already proves I take too long to write these things.)

What drives me insane about Triggers is that you can’t create them from the main Quicksilver pane (to my knowledge). You have to open the preferences window. Also, once you set the action of the trigger, then you have to click (GASP, with a mouse) on a little icon to set the hotkey. Does anyone else think it’s crazy that an application that can do Everything (including interfacing with a AJAX website like Backpack) from its paned interface, can’t add triggers from there. It seems so clunky and so 2003 ;) — to go into a window and create triggers. Alcor are you listening? ;)

Dan, you know as well as I do that “ctrl-option-cmd” is the “C Major Chord” of Quicksilver: four keypresses, my butt. ;-)

Thanks Merlin and Dan for the heads up on the blacktree site - I’ve been searching for info about the ‘blackout’ since last week.

Now back to triggers… I can’t save any trigger (across QS restarts) which uses the User Interface Access plugin. Other triggers are working fine.

I’ve just started using PathFinder (thanks Merlin), and I want to set up a trigger to pull up a new PF Terminal window. The only way I see to do this is to use the User Interface Access plugin.

When I first define the trigger, it works just fine, but QS loses the trigger details after a restart - can anyone else verify this? I’m running 10.4.4, QS B48 Boxer.

[…] Quicksilver triggers might seem like one more enigma inside of a riddle from the mind of our mysterious benefactor, Alc0r. Although writing documentation appears to be Alc0r’s only kryptonite, triggers are actually pretty well described on the Blacktree wiki. Still, it feels like relatively few people I encounter are using them (most of my friends don’t seem to even realize they exist). Since triggers have already been nicely introduced in some detail by Dan, I won’t duplicate his efforts. 43 Folders […]

My only Quicksilver trigger thus far involves a “Hot Projects” folder in my Dock. It holds aliases to the documents that are “in process” for me. I love being able to just ctrl-click the folder to have a list of what I’m working on pop up in front of me. To add a document to the list, I reveal it (usually while I’m working on it, by command-clicking the icon in the document’s window title), and hit my trigger, control-shift-p (for Projects), which creates an alias in the “Hot Projects” folder.

(In process is an AppleScript to make end-of-day backups of the originals of these aliases to my thumb drive. That’ll be my next trigger.)

I am having difficulty with the first one.

I can invoke QS and append text to a specific file, no problems. However, when I make the trigger - as per your instructions - and keep the third pane empty, I am not seeing how it is I actually get my text “in” there. Just before activating the trigger I have tried copying the text, just having it selected, but neither seems to work and I can’t think of anything else.

I am sure I am missing some ridiculously simple thing, but like most things under your nose, you never notice them.

Great list Merlin (and Thanks for all your awesome tutorials Dan).

I’m loving the load selection straight to email (directly) idea. brilliant.

I’m a huge fan of the Tags plugin, and try to tag all my files using it. So I created a trigger ‘tags’ | Show contents - from there I can quickly pick from my metadata/Spotlight Comment tags and find my files - no matter how deep they may be filed - in mere seconds.

thanks for the triggers help guys

I’m a music nerd and need to have iTunes running at all times, so I’ve taken full advantage of my options there with QS’ built-in iTunes abilities. It’s worth nothing that I use Option as my gateway into every 3rd party app - not as kosher as control, but hey - it’s right next to command!

Option+A: iTunes Artists search (A for artist!) Option+S: iTunes Song search (S for song!) Option+D: iTunes Search (D for “I’m next to A and S!”) Option+W: Current iTunes track (W for “What?”)

Add to that my use of Option+Q and Option+TAB for Which, and that’s a pretty full line-up we’ve got.

I also use F8 to launch NetNewsWire and Cmd+F8 to launch Gmail from scratch.

i display my remind output on the desktop via geektool, combined with a cmd-click trigger to edit my to do file. nice and quick, plus bonus points (i hope) for using three (count ‘em!) 43f-approved apps.

not as complex, but also useful… bind fn-click to current application -> show radial action menus, and you get a nice dichotomy: control-click for a normal contextual menu, function-click for a QS contextual menu.

I have the same problem as Curious from three posts ago. I dont see how to fill in the text. Can somebody please help?

Ah, sorry, another problem. I don’t get the “Clipboard History”, closest thing is “Clipboard Contents (Prox Object)”. I have the latest beta and searched through the catalog. What do I have to do to get this?

You need also to install the shelf plugin. Then you need to rescan qspresetshelves in the catalog under Quicksilver.

Since the quicksilever forums are down and not publicly archived anywhere: Does anybody know if the applescript functionality for getting text from QS works with Beta36? I wanted to use it to add to my list in omniOutliner but script editor won’t save the script as a script. (There’s a test script at http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/applescript_get_text_from_quicksilver that demos this functionality…it doesn’t work for me either, neither script recognizes the “process text” handler)

I am having trouble putting items on the shelf. I have beta48 (3758), beta funtions enabled, shelf pugin installed, rescanned the clipboard catalog, still not able to place items ont he shelf or even call up the shelf. Any suggestions?

Triggers work without a problem, they’re great.

Curious, Tilman: Press . to enter text into any QS field. Or select a text string and hit cmd-esc to send it to QS (the latter also works for files—very handy for opening stuff in a non-default application)

has anyone set up a trigger (or any other method via qs) to append a track or album to an iTunes playlist (besides party shuffle)?

Aaron - check out TuneTag. might be just what you’re looking for.