Give Us One Minute

Today we continue to enhance our Mac productivity skills using the free application, Quicksilver. We won’t go into a detailed description of Quicksilver here (after all, we only ask for a minute or so of your time). If you want more info on the app, check out the What is Quicksilver page.

We feel every Mac user should be using Quicksilver. It is an indispensable tool that has no equal on Windows or Linux (and we know, we’ve tried ’em all). It’s one of those applications that makes many a non–Mac user raise an eyebrow. During the next couple of blog posts, we are going to show you some cool things you can do with Quicksilver that will make you wonder how you ever lived without it. If you already use Quicksilver, we hope to share a feature or two you may not have know about.

Before using Quicksilver, you will need to download, install and configure the application (we’ll assume you can do this). After installation, we recommend using the preferences as shown in the figure below (click the images for larger, more legible versions).

Next you will need to activate several plug–ins to give Quicksilver some extra added functionality other than standard application launching and searching. Below is a list of the Plug–ins we regularly use.

We’ve seen many articles that describe the features available in Quicksilver, but are often irritated that the author fails to share what plug–ins are enabled to do this or that thing. Hopefully we won’t receive the same criticism. Just turn on all the plug–ins we use, as shown in the figure below, and you will be able to replicate all of our examples.

For extra credit activate some other plug–ins of interest and begin to experiment. However, we recommend that you only keep those plug–ins activated that you use regularly because in our experiences, having too many plug–ins activated at once can often slow down Quicksilver, or even worse, lock it up. For example, in our daily use of the Mac, we use iTunes; however, we found during our day, we generally start iTunes and just let songs play. We rarely need the features that Quicksilver provides, so we just don’t activate that plug–in and “make room” for those plug–ins we do use.

You should also activate the Triggers shown in the figure below.

We use the default ctrl–space to activate Quicksilver; however, we know many folks are fond of the cmd–space sequence. Since we still use Spotlight on occasion, we prefer the default settings. Feel free to use either, or your own, as it won’t affect our demonstrations.

Now that Quicksilver is downloaded, installed and configured, next time we’ll begin learning how to use Quicksilver to fly through our daily Mac workflow and enhance our productivity. In the meantime, experiment with Quicksilver and then come back to GUOM later and discover how to begin using the application to make short work of some usually complicated and lengthy tasks.

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