Quicksilver
Ach, such as simple idea, so hard to get across.
There are some really good tutorials for quicksilver, even a manual. But they have too many words for me.
Simple guide to Quicksilver
1. Install
Firstly, install, then tick lots of boxes for what you use (Pluggins should include Address book, Mail (and GMail if you use that), Clipboard, Calculator, Your browser (e.g. Firefox), File attributes, iPhoto, iTerm/Terminal, iTunes, Netnewswire, Web search etc.)
Also tick the “enable advanced features”. If something below doesn’t work, you probably haven’t got the plugin installed.
2. Launch Applications
The default launching command, termed “invoking”, is ctrl-space, then the first few letters of the application, e.g. “itu” for iTunes:
3. Email an attachment
Using GMail in this case, you can swifty email attachments without even having your browser beforehand. (NB: I’ve switched the style to “bezel”, just ’cause it seems nice.)
- Find a file, either by searching for it with a few letters, or holding / to start at your harddrive, or ~ to start at your home directory.
- Tab, and type in e m a, you should get “Email to”.
- Tab, and type in the first few letters of a contact in your addressbook.
- Select the appropriate address, and press enter
Of course, you could just invoke Quicksilver, and type in the persons name, tab and choose “Email” to compose an email to them.
There are many more things you can do with it, including creating custom keyboard short cuts for things (e.g. you can create a keyboard short-cut for iTunes without havin the application selected).
Other Quicksilver tutorials
- Official list of tutorials.
- GMail and quicksilver (NB: It seems you need the Mail.app pluggin to get it to work.)
Quick tips
A few little things to jog the memory:
- Clipboard history
- To access your clipboard history, invoke and press cmd - l (as in lowercase “L”).
- Calculator
- Invoke Quicksilver and press =.
- Cyberduck
- Open Cybrduck straight to one of your bookmarks by invoking, selecting Cyber duck, waiting a second and pressing right to access the bookmarks.
- Email without opening your email
- If you just want to send an email directly without opening you mail app, invoke, press full stop ., and type a message (alt - return for line breaks), tab to the next pane, select “send direct”, tab and type in the person you want to send it to. It’s the same process to send an attachement. NB: The first line of text is used as the subject, and repeated in the body.
- File Attributes
- Select a file in the first pane, then you can select things like “Lock file”, “Set comment” (helps spotlight), “Make visible” (or invisible), “Lock”, “Unlock” etc.
- Add iCal To Do or Event
- Hit . to go into text-entry mode, type in your title, tab to the next pane and select “Create iCal to do” (or event), and you can optionally tab to the next pane and select the ICS file to add it to.
- iTerm (or Terminal)
- iTerm can be the action for various things, the only one that looked useful to me was: open the selected folder in iTerm.