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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Quicksilver, summarized well

quicksilver:whatisquicksilver [docs]

This page from the Quicksilver wiki describes the program and its power much better than I ever have.

Quicksilver’s greatest strength, however, is not search. Any item you are able to find, drag, or otherwise pull into its universe is endowed with many potential uses. Hitting <tab> takes you to the action field, where you can use the same adaptive search to select what you would like to do. Among other things, files can be emailed, copied, compressed. Text can be modified, transmitted between programs, or searched for on the web. Some actions even support an indirect object, so you can send an item to a person, move files to another folder, or open files with a specific application….

In the end, Quicksilver has one very important effect. The effort associated with frequent tasks fades into the background and you are able to act without thinking. After an adaptation period, Quicksilver becomes an extension of yourself; the process fades away leaving only the results.

I realize that this may sound like a pretty fruity, hippiefied way to talk about a piece of software, but it’s actually quite accurate in my experience. Quicksilver may not click the first hour, day, or even week that you use it. But if you spend a little time to learn its subtle tricks, the return on investment is undeniably worth the effort.

Marino's picture

Damn, you sound like crack...

Damn, you sound like crack addicts. "It's not easy to get into it, but once you've used it, you can't do without it." You also sound like command line freaks. "Oh it's so much easier hitting ctrl tab -i --xyz than wasting time schlepping a mouse around to hit pretty buttons."

Sorry, I took a look and walked away. I type "sil" and it returns "silicon implants" even though I had "Silver Lake" in mind. Why not wait for me to press the "v" after the "sil" ? Too eager to please instantly. I guess I could have typed "svl" instead. But then I'd have gotten "soviet law". Then you want to slap the thing and tell it "shut up - WAIT - and listen". Seems there is no such option and I didn't have a week to figure it out.

We are Mac users. If it doesn't make sense in 5 seconds it's not for us.

 
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