Filed under: How-tos, Productivity, Tips and tricks, Odds and ends
Melman Quicksilver User's Guide
As regular readers know, we here at TUAW are huge fans of Quicksilver from Blacktree. The great thing about Quicksilver is how much functionality it puts at your finger tips. Of course the main problem with Quicksilver is how much functionality it puts at your finger tips! Even those of us who having been using it for years regularly find new and interesting things. There's just so much in there (especially with third-party plugins), but the documentation has been, to be frank, somewhat lacking (though it is getting better). Well now Howard Melman has decided to do something about that, releasing this beautifully illustrated 89-page users guide as a free PDF (Creative Commons). Anybody remotely interested in Quicksilver should have a look, and a big TUAW 'attaboy to Mr. Melman![Via Lifehacker]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Boris Shubinsky said 9:54PM on 1-18-2007
I can't view PDFs at the current moment, but I've had a question that's been lingering for a while.
I set my hotkey to the default (ctrl+space) to bring up QS, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to change it. Anyone know how?
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Mat Lu said 10:11PM on 1-18-2007
Invoke QS, Preferences -> Command -> Hotkey Activation
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Rob said 10:32PM on 1-18-2007
Excellent guide. I use Quicksilver all the time and am constantly amazed how much else it can do. Thanks.
For Boris: go to Quicksilver Preferences, Command sub-tab (3rd down on the left). The first option is for Hotkey Activation.
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Jonathan Williams said 10:33PM on 1-18-2007
Quicksilver would be useful if it didn't suck more RAM than Firefox, iTunes, Azureus combined. Of course, if you *don't* index everything, it doesn't use that much RAM, but then all those file action plugins are useless.
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W??7? said 6:13AM on 1-19-2007
Where is Quicksilver taking too much Ram? I have 3000 - 4000 files in my catalog and it takes 50 MB real and 577 MB virtual Memory. Is this too much?
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stainboy said 8:35AM on 1-19-2007
a big THANK YOU to Melman. i've been wanting to play with QS but have been put off by the anemic documentation and overwhelming amount of customizability. this guide will make a QS user out of me yet!
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slingshot said 10:32AM on 1-19-2007
Jonathan, QS doesn't suck more RAM than Firefox, iTunes, and Azureus combined on my machine. Nothing like. That would be a lot of RAM. And I mean a LOT. Are you sure your problem isn't elsewhere?
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Jon Williams said 2:53PM on 1-19-2007
I think the screenshot here sums up my issues with it. That was with a somewhat reduced catalog, somewhat reduced plugin set, fairly fresh after a quicksilver restart. Triggering it would cause a huge amount of thrashing, to the point where using spotlight is faster as an application launcher.
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John Lewis said 3:07PM on 1-19-2007
I never realized how much I've underutilized this product! This thing supports the power user in many ways I never realized. And this doc is really well done.
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Jon Williams said 3:08PM on 1-19-2007
Oh bother, no html in comments:
http://wizardishungry.com/blog/archive/why_i_uninstalled_quicksilver_dashboard_and_spotlight
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Eray said 8:33PM on 1-31-2007
Excellent guide. very useful. I know its so powerful but I had no idea that it was THIS MUCH powerful. Thanks again for the great guide.
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