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Sending short email messages from within Quicksilver

Submitted by Merlin on August 10, 2005 - 5:57am.

I’ve recently gotten in the habit of using the email subject line alone to convey a short message. The old-school best practice of geeks in this matter is to end a self-sufficient subject with (EOM), which stands for, you guessed it, “end of message.”

Neat trick here for Quicksilver users to dash off an EOM-type email from right inside the app. (Yes, I assume this requires the Mail and Address Book plugins, possibly others, yadda yadda yadda).

  1. Invoke Quicksilver (usu. CTRL-Spacebar)
  2. Hit . (period key) to get the variable input field
  3. Type a short EOM-style message
    • Try “My 43F test message (EOM)”
  4. Tab to the second pane
  5. Type, say, dir until you get “Email to...(Send Directly)”
  6. Tab to the third pane
  7. Type until your own Address Book entry appears
    • Optionally right-arrow in to select the specific (non-default) email address you want to send to.
  8. Hit Return

If everything is configured right, this should send an email with the contents of step 3 as both the subject and the body of the message. Of course, this would also work really well with Andrew’s Gmail To-do and Journal system among many other things, but I love it especially as way to quickly dash off a super-efficient email without changing modes. And most recipients love the brevity, so everybody wins.

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If you find yourself doing...

Submitted by Dan Dickinson (not verified) on August 10, 2005 - 7:32am.

If you find yourself doing this a lot, I recommend rearranging the action order for the Text object type.

Go to the QS preferences, click on “Actions”. You’ll get two panes; pick “Text” on the left. On the right you’ll see all the actions you can do to text. Drag the one you find yourself doing the most to the top of the list; disable any you don’t use.

Now you can skip the second pane and go directly to the third.