Prompted by a TUAW reader comment on my post the other day about some Quicksilver fundamentals, I thought I would take a crack at posting some short tutorials on what Quicksilver actually does, and how to get started with it. I'm talking about the most basic of the basics here for anyone who is curious but still confused as to what the heck they're looking at the first time they launch Quicksilver. To anyone who can't make heads or tails of it: I don't blame you. It took me quite a while to wrap my head around all this stuff, so I hope I can do you some justice with this post.
Disclaimer - I use a somewhat modified version of Quicksilver and I've added a lot of extras, but for this demo I *think* I've properly fixed my copy to look like a default Quicksilver install.
Speaking of my screenshot - let's get started.
Quicksilver's website says it is a "unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." Basically, that means it's an easy way to search for just about anything on your Mac and *do* something with it - kinda like Spotlight except, as of this writing, Quicksilver can't really search inside of files like Spotlight can. Quicksilver rises above and beyond Spotlight in that it allows you to do far more with Mac OS X and the items you search for, as you'll soon find out.
By default, you can invoke Quicksilver with ctrl - space, and you should be presented with a window like the screenshot above (yes, you can change that shortcut in the preferences). This window contains two main sections called "Subject' and "Action." These sections are Quicksilver's bread and butter: the Subject section allows you to search for something, just like you would with Spotlight. You can begin typing and Quicksilver will immediately begin to show you results, as seen in my next screenshot:
One of the first "gotchas" to remember is that Quicksilver will reset your input (near the top left of the window, in this case I typed "TUAW") if you pause for about a second and begin typing again; it doesn't act like Spotlight. If this irks you, there is a setting in the preferences that will allow you to extend the amount of time Quicksilver waits to reset the input field.
Once you stop typing, Quicksilver will open the fly-out window you see on the right containing a list of other choices it found based on your input. Its first choice is already placed in the Subject section, but in case you want to chose something else, you can simply arrow down to the selection you want and the Subject section will change to reflect the items you're arrowing to.
This is where the Actions section, on the bottom of the Quicksilver window, comes into play. That Action section tells you what is going to happen with the item in the Subject section once you hit the return key. In this case I have selected a bookmark for TUAW, and the Action will be to open that bookmark in my default browser. It's pretty straight-forward, and not much unlike using Spotlight so far, right?
This Action section is where I believe Quicksilver becomes truly useful. Instead of hitting enter on the item you've found with Quicksilver, hit the Tab key to move from the Subject section down to the Action section (notice how the blue highlighting shifts down the Action. You can also use shift-tab to jump back up to the Subject section). Now, hit the right arrow, and you'll get another fly-out window to the right that contains a list of actions. These allow you to chose what you want to do with the item you've found, and this list will change depending on the item you search for. In this case, with a bookmark, I can chose to (in order on this list): open it (the default action), copy its URL to the Clipboard (a plugin I've installed), open it with a specific browser, amongst a few other actions we won't get into for now. For an example of how Actions can change depending on the item you've found, check out the actions that are possible with a contact that I searched for from Address Book in my next screenshot:
Here, I searched for the TUAW Team contact that I have in Address Book. Now the default action, as you can see, is to send an email to this contact, which I think is far more useful than Spotlight, since it merely opens the contact in Address Book. If I hit return, Quicksilver will open a new message in my default email client (Mail.app) and automatically address that message to the TUAW Team address. But let's not stop there - check out all the other actions that are possible. I can still show that contact in Address Book, open that contact in Address Book immediately for editing, copy the TUAW Team email address to my clipboard, and all sorts of other stuff. Try searching for other types of items, such as applications, and tab down to the actions section to see what's possible with them. Hopefully, this will help get your first foot in the door with how Quicksilver works, and what is possible.
If you don't like the default action or the order actions are arranged, you can check out the Actions panel in Quicksilver's preferences like I recommended in my last post (either through the icon in your menubar or by hitting cmd-, when Quicksilver is invoked) for a complete list of all the possible actions, in which case you can toggle some on/off and reorder them. Looking through those might also help you explore all the things that are possible with items you find.
One last tip before I wrap this up is that Quicksilver, as its website states, is incredibly extensible. If you aren't a Safari/Address Book user, you can get plugins for most other browsers as well as a plugin for Entourage support. There are a boatload of plugins available that allow you not only to find stuff but control applications too, like changing music in iTunes with hotkeys, browsing through NetNewsWire headlines, searching the web with hundreds of search engines, creating archives of files/folders you search for and much, much more. Once you get used to the fundamentals in this tutorial, feel free to start exploring, as that becomes part of the fun of learning how Quicksilver can completely change the way you use your Mac.
Hopefully this tutorial did you some good, but if it didn't, feel free to post questions and requests in the comments. I'll try to do my best to help you out, and you can always check tutorials from other sites that have already posted quite a few of their own such as 43 Folders and Blacktree themselves.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
3-11-2006 @ 5:22PM
maRRRk said...
i use this app constantly, but have never taken it pass the action stage of "open".
now i'm going to be setting me some actions!
thanks!
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 5:45PM
Tomm said...
Yeah, I used it for months before realising what the second panel even did. I just never questioned it, and I used it as a Spotlight for applications.
But it's soooo much more :-)
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 6:12PM
Kokopelli said...
There is so much you can do with Quicksilver. It is both a blessing and a curse. No manual could be written to cover everything it could do. Quite simply it depends upon the individual as to how all the components are used together.
Taking the simple example of the contact. You chose to compose an email. Notice the ">" beside the name? That means that this subject can be searched into. Instead of tabbing over to choose an action you could have hit "/" or right arrow and received a list of the attributes for the contact. This would allow you to choose one of any of the emails for the contact. Or, as is common for me, it would allow you to look up the contact's phone number without ever opening the Address Book. With the right plugins you could even have Quicksilver send an SMS to the contact or even call the number for you on your bluetooth enabled phone.
Learning Quicksilver is not a matter of study and reading, though that is needed as well. To truly grasp the extent of QS you have to experiment. I use QS so extensively in my day to day computer operation that a Mac without it feels like a completely different operating system. Usable but slow and awkward by comparison.
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 6:18PM
Brent said...
QS is something I've always wanted to use more extensively, but have found it a bit confusing/intimidating. Thx very much for this!
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 6:44PM
Justin said...
I've tried so hard to see what the big deal of this program is...but I cant. I've used it and done all the things you've shown but it just not faster at doing anything I was doing before.
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 6:58PM
joppe said...
"I use a somewhat modified version of Quicksilver and I've added a lot of extras"
show us how cool your looks like then
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 7:14PM
yinyang said...
i know it's linked to on the blacktree site, but this tutorial from Dan Dickinson does only require 10 minutes before you start to grasp the potential of QS...
http://vjarmy.com/archives/2004/03/quicksilver_a_b.php
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 7:17PM
Tomm said...
The problem with it is that a lot of the decent productivity takes ages to configure. For example, I knew that there was a plugin to search Google, but it's not enabled by default (At least not on the version I have). So I spent the best part of this evening sorting that out, and it's not an easy task, for something that could have been install by default really easily.
Likewise with the "Get New Mail" plugin, it takes some really awkward hacking to get it to work. When you get everything worked out though, it's great :)
The website needs improving, although the forum is very useful.
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 7:21PM
David Chartier said...
5: Quicksilver does a lot more than the things I've mentioned here, which is where more of its appeal lies for its passionate users. One example is being able to type some text into Quicksilver and chosing an action to set it as your chat application status. Another is simply using it to search: I can type ctrl-space, the letter "G" for my Google search, then type in a search query and hit enter a lot faster than using my mouse to go down to the dock, click to open a browser, click in the search field, etc. Another great example is a Quicksilver tip I found and posted last week, about being able to select multiple items with Quicksilver (even if they're in different directories across your Mac) and then selecting multiple people to immediately send those files to in an email - all without ever actually having to touch a message composition window.
A lot of the appeal of apps like Quicksilver is being able to do things with a keyboard a lot more quickly than with a mouse. Many people who are confused about the appeal of apps like this might not be quite as comfortable or quick on their keyboard as a an application like this needs you to be in order to make it useful. There are also deeper paradigms about how it's easier for a human to type keys on a keyboard rather than using an awkward UI like a mouse to control a small pointer on a screen to find something, but that becomes an entirely different conversation in and of itself.
Reply
3-11-2006 @ 7:59PM
galmeida said...
After reading lots of posts about QS in TUAW I decided to give it a try, today I can't live without it. QS is very addictive and makes the dock somewhat obsolete.
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 5:09AM
Steve in Denmark said...
If it's so good already, why is it still a 'Beta', and why will this version 'expire six months after the initial release'? Will they begin to charge for it after that? And after comments like "today I can't live without it. QS is very addictive", will it be an exorbitant amount?
Seems to me to be filling a much needed gap in the market.
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 9:31AM
David Chartier said...
#10: Quicksilver is open source, they won't be charging for it. That's also why it's a beta, and probably will be for some time; it's not like the developers have a set schedule in stone of what milestones they'll be hitting or the next time they'll make a run for investment capital.
Besides, "beta" is the new cool. Just see everything Google ever makes, and even Microsoft now (their virus scanner, Live.com, etc.)
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 2:17PM
Anonymous said...
Wow, just wow! When I heard all the jitter about quicksilver I thought, why would I need it, I already have spotlight. I just discovered quicksilver after a year of mac osx use and it is great. This guide is also really great and helped me get started with it. Although I have 1 question:
I have a Logitech Marble Mouse and it comes with 2 extra buttons which are supposed to act as scroll up and scroll down but I dont know how to use them nor would I if i knew how use them on a mac. But I thought it would be really cool if i could press those buttons down and they would active quicksilver instead of ctrl and space. Is there a way to do this?
Here is a picture of the mouse : http://tuaw.com
-Anonymous
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 2:20PM
anonymous said...
sorry I posted the wrong link at the end :
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005T406.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 2:51PM
Philipp said...
what am I not getting about this app? I've been playing around with it for quite some time today and still can't see a use for it.
Launchbar comes ready configured and does about all I need. Everybody is talking about the configurability of QS. All and well but exactly nothing that I tried has worked. Modules that I tried to install wouldn't work, when I type in something it comes up with about everything but what I'm looking for. Maybe I am totally dumb, but if I couldn't get a simple websearch to work after hours of trying I think I can say with some authority that this app has a problem.
I for one am staying with Launchbar.
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 3:33PM
Kokopelli said...
Quicksilver takes experimentation and patience. As for getting google search to work, did you install the web search module? If so did you either create a web search catalog or activate the Web Search Catalog that comes by default?
What plugins did you try that are failing, and what did you try?
If you prefer Luaunchbar that is fair enough, quite a few do. But the problems you describe are not normal. I have been using QS for a little over a year and I will say in honesty it has its good points and bad, but it is generally fairly stable.
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 3:47PM
Brian Burns said...
FYI - while free and extensible, Quicksilver is NOT open source.
Still the best application in the world :-)
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 4:38PM
Philipp said...
Err... I guess I tried both. Gave up when I realized that it would take ages to get the the many search templates to fly that I use in Launchbar. What didn't work at all was the Gmail plugin, NNW and some others I don't recall.
Maybe the problems were not really in stability but as was pointed out, the learning curve is mighty steep. The dependencies of several different settings are really hard to figure out. The documentation is, well is there even one? The forums are quite extensive, but many of the tips there didn't work for me, maybe they were for another release.
I'll stick with launchbar. QS sure looks slick and might be quite powerful but its odd configuration takes way too much time for a timesaver, in my opinion.
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 5:31PM
OxyMormoN said...
Butler all the way!
full itunes control via hotkeys, menubar item
launch applications (like quicksilver, but better style imo)
browse computer from the menubar (almost a windows start menu, but customisable)
access to all browser bookmarks from menubar
multiple pasteboards
8 hot corners, completely configurable
spotlight enhancements
internet search via hotkeys
All out of the box, all 100% customisable, and free to boot. I used quicksilver for a good while, then tried Butler and haven't looked back since.
Reply
3-12-2006 @ 11:13PM
J said...
I don't get the endless tinkering with interfaces and launchers. I have a launcher, it's called the dock. And if I wanted to run PathFinder with Quicksilver, I'd be running some sort of abomination... would it even be a Mac anymore?
Also, 2 days since last TUAW posting?
Also also, seems there are a whole helluva lot of Quicksilver postings here.
It's getting like the Cinematical obssession with comic book adaptations.
Reply