Don’t be so abstract! I mean “the big sexy comes with how QS understands the potential verbal relationships between any of those objects”. Whatever! I want to know what QS does! Give me a couple of different use-cases for the things that really make your life easier.

I am not a Mac person, and as such I have no experience with QuickSilver. After reading this description I still have no idea what QS does. It sounds like it is just a search engine for your computer, but the article hints at it being truly magical. What practical things will this program do to save hours on my day/week?

“Another way to open stuff? Um… Cool, I guess…?” I thought when I first installed Quicksilver at the rabid, raving insistence of the Mac geek community. And there is sat on my drive, unused, for several months.

It was only after reading a few articles about Quicksilver tips/tricks and playing around with it quite a bit did I realize its amazing potential. I can look up contacts, do internet searches, dump information into my GTD inbox, calculate sums, open documents, and loads more in a few quick key-presses (that are now second nature).

Gone are the days of clumsy mousing-around. I use Quicksilver constantly, and it’s probably added cumulative hours of productivity to my life.

I figure no one is expecting this point of view, so I should comment. I am a windows user and fanboy (I have lots of 3d modelers and art programs for school that Macs don’t agree with). The only times I have ever used my friend’s mac I have always been blown away by quicksilver. To a windows user like myself, quicksilver is the holy grail program. And like the grail, I search the internet far and wide for it, but only come up with poor knock offs. If I were to buy a mac tomorrow, it would be the first thing I would install (Then I’d install bootcamp, ;p). If it were released for windows, I would be first in line to buy it (I would pay money!). Right now I am using a very modded version of Launchy and it still cannot compare. Both the interfaces of windows and macs are full of nonsenical gui’s and programs like quicksilver are where the new UI’s need to be heading. Till then, I will continue my search, assistance would be much appreciated.

Quicksilver actions
trigger the gap between being
and using a Mac.

[Sorry, QS has to be abstract. There are those who use it and those who don't. I tell folks to install it and set up triggers for their three favorite applications and use it for a week. After that, they understand.]

Maybe its just me, but I installed Quicksilver and was quickly annoyed by it. As a long time Linux user I am someone who always has at least one terminal window open. 99% of the stuff I might use Quicksilver for I use the command line instead.

Maybe I am just a geek and find the command line to by my home or it could be just I just have not found the usefulness of the application.

Quicksilver intimidated me at first — knowing I could do SO MUCH STUFF with it implied a steep learning curve (and I wondered whether it was worth the effort). Now, I can’t imagine living without it. Not because I’ve mastered all of the fancy stuff it can do (while admittedly all of that stuff is impressive — and powerful — I just never got around to it), but because it:

• launches applications,
• opens folders, and
• opens files

lighting fast, without having to touch the mouse, and without having to navigate through Finder.

It saves me invaluable time and effort. That’s it. That’s the sexy.

I love it, it saves so much hassle as a launcher alone, but of course we all know it’s much more. I think your correlation with CLI is spot on. It’s an excellent example of integration of a keystroke person with the GUI universe, i.e., CLI without really “leaving” the GUI.

I use QS to empty trash in Thunderbird with one function key and typing em (as in empty). I was hoping to find a single funkey for it, but I’m guessing TBird doesn’t respect the Mac OS X interface 100%? ANyway, I the WIndows guy am now trying to explain to the poor Mac guys who don’t use QS what it is!

i have found describe Quicksilver to be all but a useless exercise. I didnt understand it until i watched the episodes of MacBreak. I’ve also had no luck explaining it to people. It is much easier to show them what it can do.

Many of you may be to young to remember what it was like to have a pool of secretaries working in an organization to help out knowledge workers. Well, Quicksilver helps fill that role for me in making many tasks as easy as asking a secretary.

Email this document to this person who is in my address book

Call this person (Type in persons name, select phone number, tab, call in skype).

If you think of Quicksilver as just a launcher, you are net getting the whole picture.

Don’t forget the verbs!

Hi,

Ever since I started using Quicksilver I have got rid of all the ‘stuff’ on my dock. I rarely have to go rooting into my apps folder to launch an app - I have actions set up to launch all my most used apps.

The killer for me is the ability to add stuff to iCal and add the GTD contexts. That has saved me so much time.

But, I have tried to get my friends to use it, and no-one else really gets it. I have to admit, when I first installed it, to make myself use it, I got rid of the stuff on my Dock - I think that was one thing that made me use and learn Quicksilver.

I have tried and tried, but I just can’t get my hand to remember all the tricks that QS can do. It’s powerful, I can’t deny that. But it’s too powerful for me.

I use LaunchBar. It does a lot of what QS does, but it’s easier to remember because it doesn’t have everything.

Sure, it costs money were QS is free. But I find LB much more useful so I use it.

I guess it’s like QuickSilver is “vi” and LaunchBar is Emacs. Not a perfect analogy, but it serves. :)

Kind of ironic that something that relies entirely on word input is so difficult to describe in words!

Ahem. Anyway…

I remember installing QS and just not getting it at first. I’d press the key sequence to launch it, and then just think, ‘Well, what now?’. But once I forced myself to use it for all those things I would hunt around in separate applications to do, it was great. To me, QS is an app that puts all (well, most) of your applications’ functions in one place, where you can chain them together. A bit like an Automator workflow, but without having to build and run it!

The other great power feature it has is the text input, which you can use to append text to a particular file, or add an appointment to iCal, all without leaving whatever you’re doing to do so, without flicking to iCal. It just saves time!

Not definitive, by any means, but hope that helps someone!

Instead of searching for “Mail,” create a trigger with the keyboard, e.g. Command + M and save yourself the time searching for it and pressing ‘enter.’ But you all knew this of course…

Everything else, inserting text in text-files, sending mails, etc., I don’t use to be honest. And that is the part which is probably the hardest to describe, because it’s so abstract. Huh, inserting text into a file without opening it? What?

I’m a fan of starting simple. Explain Spotlight. Explain triggers. And hey, once you get that and feel comfortable with it, you can do other cool stuff too.

It’s worth learning how to use this beautifully intuitive app. A couple of keystrokes and everything on your Mac is available. However, I’ve found it’s really not enough to talk about Quicksilver’s benefits to a non-user. Hands on, demonstrate and walk them through. Bingo!

its the reason why I switched to a mac…

IMHO, the main reason why Quicksilver is hard to explain is the same reason that it’s really somewhat hard to learn. Although it’s reasonably self-consistent, it’s still a new syntax that requires you to learn how to ‘speak’ QS. And until you’ve done that (and I haven’t, not really) then QS is pretty much just “A way to set up keyboard shortcuts to do common operations”… which would be my quick definition of what Quicksilver is for the majority of users.

I don’t really completely grok QS to the point where I intuitively know how to go beyond the bounds of what I mostly use it for. It’s easy enough to activate QS and type a filename. And I’ve learned a few other things like how to web-search… but even those 6 steps:

1) invoke QS with command-space 2) type ‘Wiki’ if I want to use Wikipedia 3) hit 4) hit again 5) type the term I want to search for 6) hit

are really just a shortcut that I’ve memorized, not something that’s based on my intuitive grasp of QS syntax. For the novice user it would be far more intuitive to just invoke QS with the command-space and then type “wiki ” and hit . The double-tab is a function of the way QS’s language works, I understand, but it’s hardly intuitive and took me a bit of documentation-searching before I figured it out.

Personally I think there’s definitely room for some layer on TOP of QS (or a replacement for QS) that simplifies things down to the way that most people use it… as a set of basic shortcuts for common actions. Failing that, even just a webpage somewhere that gives the top 20-most-common useful shortcuts so I can just go pick the ones I want to memorize.

I can see how (for instance) adding a new bit of text to the beginning of a text file could be rather useful… but I’ve never memorized the 8 steps required to do such a thing and even if I do memorize them sometime today, if a week goes by without using those same steps I’ll almost certainly forget them. Again, if I had some higher-level shortcut where I could set something up to just invoke QS and type a command and the text I want to add, it would be a hell of a lot easier to memorize. Remembering to:

  Hit “.” to start typing in the variable input field

and all the additional steps just isn’t intuitive.

I’m sure the QS devotees are wanting to lecture me right now on how the syntax is so much more POWERFUL than what I want to do. Whatever. You can always make a more powerful language. I don’t want to learn a language, I want a way to increase my productivity.

Couple all of this with the really convoluted configuration panels (don’t get me started…) and I have to say that I really have mixed feelings about QS. Don’t get me wrong, I use it constantly… but hardly consider it a good example of a well-designed framework for the average user.

Can’t describe QS, but can’t use a mac without it..

I tried QS many times, but in the end, it used too much of my (maxed out at 1.25GB) RAM and my processor time (1.2 GHz G4). Responses to command-space were often not immediate, so when it crashed (frequently) I never was sure if QS is still working on my request or had crashed. And every time it reindexed my files, things got really slow…

I might try it again with a newer machine, but for my almost 3 years old iBook it’s not an option.

Quicksilver is my ubiquitous inbox when I’m at my machine.
I’m constantly being bombarded by things to do, things to remember, things to figure out, things to put on thursday’s agenda, etc.

My quicksilver trigger is the first thing I hit when I look up from my laptop at the latest person to hover in front of me. By the time I’ve figured out what to add to my ‘pile’ i’ve appended the task into an appropriate text file and can say, “Got it” (now scram) and when I look back at my screen, quicksilver has vanished, and I’m back doing what I was doing before.

I also really appreciate being able to fly among apps using quicksilver. My fingers never leave the keyboard as I zip hither and yon among apps, perform searches on my machine and the web.

I also really love the ability to Quit Others when I’m just flat tired of having apps open that don’t need to be open anymore. I’m never more than a couple of keystrokes away from having everything but the app I’m working in JUST GO AWAY silently, in the background. Quicksilver is my silent application assassin. mmmmmmmm.

It’s the difference between taking the stairs or using a zip line. Stairs are safe, slow and familiar. Zip lines are scary (at first) but more fun and get you there faster. Hi ho Zipsilver, away!