Getting Started¶

When I want to do something on my Mac, my first reaction is to use Quicksilver. Whether I want to send an e-mail, search for something on the web, open a bookmark, file, or an application, revisit a web page I looked at yesterday, pause iTunes, find a song, or virtually anything else, I type ⌃Space and activate Quicksilver to do it. That makes Quicksilver very powerful, but also a little difficult to explain. I'll use an example of sending e-mail to my friend Ashish.

First, I could open Mail, type ⌘N to open a new message, type enough of Ashish's name to have her address appear in the To: field, and then ⇥ to the Subject and continue writing the message. I could instead open Contacts, search for Ashish's card, and ⌃-click (or right-click) on the e-mail address and choose Send E-mail.

This is how I do it using Quicksilver. I type ⌃SpaceA↩. That's it.

Let's walk through that. ⌃Space, at any time, in any application, activates Quicksilver bringing up the two pane window shown here:

When I type A, Ashish appears in the first pane because I often send her e-mail. Her picture appears because I have her picture in her Contacts entry (mostly because Quicksilver makes such good use of it). Also, another window appears below the main interface with other choices. If I kept typing, those would change to be some other choice, but since Ashish is what I want, I'm done. The second pane shows the Compose E-mail action which is what I want to do. This appears because it's the most common thing I do with contacts. Typing ↩ performs the selected action so I see a new Compose Message window appear from Mail with Ashish's address filled in.

Maybe using Quicksilver doesn't seem that much easier than the other methods described, but the Quicksilver method is done entirely via keystrokes. There's no mousing to the Dock to open a particular icon or having to select a specific field. Just type 3 keystrokes. Maybe the comparison seems unfair because I said some of the choices appeared so easily since I do this often, but that's one of the advantages of Quicksilver. It learns what you do and makes your most frequent tasks easier. The other methods don't learn and don't get any shorter.

Now, let's say I wanted to send a document to Ashish. Instead of choosing the default Compose E-mail action, I can tab to the second pane, type EMI to choose E-mail Item... (Compose). This opens a third pane which I tab to and type ~/Q to choose a document in my home directory that has "Q" in its name. Now the message window is opened with the attachment all set up. I can edit the message as needed and send it.

Now, say Ashish was expecting this document and I didn't need to include any text in the message, just the attachment. I could choose the action E-mail Item... (Send) and then the message is sent in the background without opening Mail and without disturbing what I was doing before. The subject is set to the name of the attachment, and the body includes a short (customizable) sentence saying that the file is attached to the message.

The above works if I'm thinking, "I want to send Ashish this document". Say instead I thought "I need to send this document to Ashish". I can do this as well. Select the document in the first pane, choose the E-mail To... (Compose) action and then choose Ashish. I find these options to be the real strength of Quicksilver. It lets me easily do what I want, however I think of it at the time. I don't need to change my thinking to how Quicksilver wants me to do things, and it learns from me and gets easier to use over time.

The amazing thing about Quicksilver is how flexible it is. Via a wide variety of plugins, Quicksilver can select just about anything on your Mac as an object and do potentially hundreds of different things to it. Of course, it can also do a lot more, get used to reading that.