Quicksilver ninja reporting for duty.

I am planning on updating all three of my tutorials for the current beta this weekend, so if anyone is getting confused by Alcor's recent preference pane changes, don't worry, it'll become clear soon.

You rule. I couldn't ask for a more competent ninja.

Hi there,

I am intrigued by Quicksilver, but I have been using LaunchBar for years and am very used to it. I feel perhaps like a Windows user deciding whether to take the Mac plunge.

Are there any tutorials or tips for people like me, a sort of starting place?

Maybe it's just a matter of diving in, but if anybody who used to use LaunchBar has thoughts on where to start, you know a sort of reference point -- or perhaps an idea of where one can wade in before diving in, I would be much obliged.

Thanks!

Robyn

I'm having trouble with the Shelf. I've heard lots of tutorials mention it but none of them talk about how to use it. After a while I figured out that it's a plug-in that's not selected by default.

Now I'm having trouble figuring out how to use it. I finally figured out that I can show the shelf by pressing CMD-OPTION-S when QS is activated but I can't figure out an easy way to add stuff to the shelf or use the things that are in there.

The documentation here implies that I should have "Put on shelf" as an available verb. But I don't. The only way I can see to use the shelf is by dragging things to and fro, which kind of defeats the pupose of using QS.

Apparently the "Put On Shelf" action is disabled by default; you'll need to go into Actions and tick the box before you'll see it.

My understanding of the shelf is that it's sort of like a pasteboard for files or clippings or whatever objects you'd like.

I get a lot of questions about the shelf - maybe I'll do a quick tutorial this weekend.

Nick Santilli has a good roundup of tutorials, which Merlin has linked to on more than one occasion.

Thanks. That's exactly what I needed to know.

The only remaining question is why, when I type "shelf" into QS, I don't get the Shelf object. So the only way I know to see it's contents is to use the CMD-OPTION-S shortcut.

But still, thanks a bunch.

Actually, I'm still having some problems with the Shelf. I can add stuff now but I can't remove anything. When I right click on shelf items I see a "remove" option but it's greyed-out.

Okay, there's something I've been doing for months now and have been looking for a way to automate/streamline the process, never with any luck. QS seems like it's finally SO close to being able to do everything I want, but I know it can be simpler and I can't figure out how to do it.

I'm trying to take an image from the internets (via Safari), scale it to be no more than 200 pixels on a side, save it as JPG if not already, then post it to my weblog. What I do now is:

1) Drag the image from Safari to the desktop.
2) Command+Space for Quicksilver
3) Type ~/Desktop, right-arrow, then down-arrow navigate to the new filename.
4) Hit tab, then type "Scaleimage" to invoke the action from the Image Manipulator QS plugin.
5) Type "fit 200 as jpg", hit return, and it's saved to the desktop in the right format.
6) Open up ecto (or Transmit, or whatever).
7) Drag the scaled image into the new post window.

Now my questions on how to simplify this:
1) Can I skip the desktop, going from Safari to the clipboard or directly to the QS shelf? (Right-clicking and choosing "Copy Image" in Safari just shows up as a URL in the clipboard history & shelf)

2) Is there a way to save the "fit 200 as jpg" command to the Image Manipulation plugin instead of typing it in every time?

3) Can I add actions for ecto like "new blog post" or "paste image into post", etc. without writing a plugin? Or is there a QS-friendly blog program like ecto?

4) If I do have to write a plugin, is the API documented somewhere?

Thanks
Chuck

unfortunately image manipulation currently only works on files. The best you could do to speed this up would be to make a trigger for the later part of it, doing a predifned scale on the finder selection you just made.

I'm not sure this question is in the right thread, but the magic message box appeared and here goes:

Quicksilver is not automatically loading my entourage (yeck!) contacts. It does work if I go to preferences-->modules-->entourage contacts, highlight it and manually rescan. I have the most recentverison of all s/w.

Any help?

In case anyone else is as dense as I am: go to Preferences|Triggers, check "Command Window with Selection", assign a hot-key to it (like Command+Shift+Space).

I'll check it out, though, thanks for the tip.

Nice podcast Merlin. I've been using QS for a while now but never really dug into it until this weekend.

I took a look at the text manipulation plugin and don't get the results you have. If I choose the text file and tab to the verb; type append i don't get an option for that. Am I using the correct plugin? Mine says "text manipulation actions", but doesn't seem to be working even though it's activated.

Got it working. I didn't have the actions enabled.

The append functionality gives lots of people trouble, so you're not alone.

Have you tried Robert's troubleshooting guide? The file not having ".txt" at the end is one pretty common problem. Also be double sure you're running in (if memory serves) "Beta" mode at "QS>Preferences>Extras>Application feature level"

That's actually how I fixed it Merlin. I noticed that it only works with plain text files. I was trying to use it with a rich text file. Once I sorted that out it worked great. I do have mine in beta mode too.

Thank you for the podcast. It perked my interest and got me playing more with Quicksilver which I've used for a while now but not extensively. I just posted how I am using QS to fire up a rails project in webrick in case you're interested.

Just downloaded Quicksilver a couple of weeks ago. Your brief intro and review with Leo was helpful. One quick question: I have and Intel IMac and do not see the Action "Compress" as an option as you demonstrated on the podcast. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Make sure you have the File Compression Module installed and enabled.

I think the the thing that mostly troubles people new to Quicksilver is the plug-in - actions stuff that you have to do to get it to do all the neat things Merlin (and others) do. So, as a quick down and dirty about it here we go:

When you first download Quicksilver it comes with the very basic functionality enabled. There are additional plug-ins that must be installed in order to expand the level of usage beyond application launching. Once a plug-in is installed it opens up (usually) a new range of actions available to the user. Sometimes they are automatically enabled, sometimes you have to enable them through the Actions part of the preferences. Taking Merlin's infamous Text Manipulation plug-in (which isn't a plug-in that is enabled at the installation of Quicksilver) as an example if I wanted to do his append to text trick I would first have to enable (basically download) the Text Manipulation plug-in by checking it's checkbox in the Other (aka Uninstalled) plug-in pane of the Plug-Ins pref pane. You should see something like "Text Manipulation plug-in installed" pop up on your screen letting you know that it has installed the plug-in. The next thing you should do is go to the Preference Pane and click General-->Actions. A (if you have a lot of plug-ins installed) large list of "verbs" or actions comes up and you will have to navigate to the text actions and make sure the one's such as append and prepend are enabled by checking their checkboxes.

This routine needs to happen every time you enable a new plug-in as I notice that some of the cool actions are left unchecked after install and you have to manually turn them on.

Another thing that catches people is the Application Feature Level needs to be set to Beta (this is located in Pref-->Extras).

Hope this helps. :)

While you are trying to figure out automator and folder actions, you can do this.

Instead of going thru step 3, just hit Command/Apple-G.

This will take the file you selected in step 1 as the "noun" to run the "verb" (scale image) on.

This is easier then going thru the hassle of finding the correct file if you have a lot of files on your desktop... plus a single keep stroke (apple-G) is faster then down arrow, right arrow, down arrow, etc.

I've been intrigued by QS for awhile, and Merlin's vid got me to try it out. However, after downloading it and starting it up, I've only gotten the spinning wheel of death. This SPOD appears when I hover my mouse over either the dock icon of QS or the menu icon of QS.

This also occurred the other time I tried out QS, about 8 months ago. At that time, I figured I'd done something wrong and simply deleted it. This time, I figured that it might just be indexing my Mac (a 2-year old 2.0 Gig G5 tower, 10.4.7, 2.5 gigs of RAM, with 300 gig hard drive, 179 gigs of empty space left). So, I left it run for the past 4 days, day and night. Still, I get the spinning color wheel. I've tried restarting, rebuilding permissions, and running a few of the other fun things on Onyx. Still no love.

Any ideas? I'm not pretty confident that this isn't indexing. Something is amiss. Should I try deleting the plist file?

thanks for any suggestions.

tuqqer

My question, and it may already be answered in another tutorial or forum post, is how to exclude certain files (and file types) from my catalog.

I've added a custom location (my Work folder) to the catalog and items in it are showing up in the main interface. Which is good. But I've got an awful lot of Python code and I only want to see the .py files not the (sort of) compiled .pyc files that accompany them.

I seem to regularly select the wrong one when I'm not really paying attention to my search results, meaning that I get a garbled file in my text editor rather than the Python source code I thought I was going to see.

I notice in the Catalog preference 'Show Info' window that there is a 'Source Options' tab. Is this the way to control what gets included in my Catalog? And if so, how do I use it to exclude certain files and file types.

I believe all you need to do is to uncheck the items in your catalog and it won't scan them. For example, if I wanted QS to not scan Pages then I would go to Prefs-->Catalog-->Applications-->Applications Folder-->Little info button on lower right hand corner-->Content-->Uncheck Pages. I believe entire folders can be done in this same way.

I don't know, every time I've installed QS I have had no problems. You might want to look at this. It may give you some ideas of what has helped others. I don't think it should take 4 days to catalog your drive. Any network drives hooked up?

I could do that, but spread over a few folders there are probably a couple of hundred files to exclude. Does anyone know how to do with something like a regular expression?

I've tried Quicksilver on 5 or 6 different occasions. I can see that it's a powerful application. Still, I always end up uninstalling it. Spotlight works for the launcher aspect of Quicksilver (thought it requires a few more keystrokes) and the other aspects aren't overly useful to me - I don't use Mail (GMail), I don't use iCal (Google Calendar), I don't use iChat (Adium) etc. It seems to me that I'm missing out on a lot of QS goodness because of this.

I have GMail Notifier set as my default mail handler in quicksilver. Is there a way to have QS catalog my GMail contacts? If not, can anyone recommend a good application for syncing my GMail contacts and Mac Address Book?