Getting to know QuickSilver

After having read on quite a few websites out there about QuickSilver I still wasn’t sure what this is all about. Sure, right on the homepage it says “Launcher” but it also says

An evolving framework for accessing and manipulating many forms of personal data.

I guess it always simply ends with installing a tool and seeing for yourself what it is all about. So today I finally found some time to do it and downloaded build 3348 not really expecting anything simply because I didn’t even remember anymore why I wanted to try QuickSilver in the first place ;)

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Then I installed it and everywhere I say “plugins” and things like that. Ignoring them for now I started to mess around with it. To make a small understatement: It’s a hell of an application launcher. If you’re a KDE or Gnome user you should know the Alt+F2 shortcut which opens some small app that lets you enter the name of a program in the $PATH and if you’re lucky also does some path completion for you so that you can also open a file from your $HOME by entering something like “vim ~/.bashrc”.

QuickSilver takes this idea to a whole new level by allowing you to define for every appliction your own custom actions. Just a small example: I have a small Clips file in my home directory which I now want to open in TextMate: ^space + “textmate” + “tab” + “datei…” + tab + “01.clp” + enter

Before I get angry mails by KDE and Gnome users: Yeah, I know that this is basically also possible with the Launchers provided by these two DEs, but somehow QuickSilver feels way more polished than any of these simply because its speed AND auto-completion :)

Easy and still generic. Really nice :) Now I got really curious about what other things are possible with QuickSilver esp. on the plugin and module side. But enough for now. I have some other things to finish before doing that.

QuickSilver homepage