Quicksilver is easily the best reason to move to the Mac, although it’s widely adopted among users, so many of them don’t have a clue how deep the app really goes. This post is all about the things you can do with quicksilver, that nobody uses. 

The Right Arrow 

You can dig down in the finder, or even to applications, using the right arrow. Say you’re using iTunes and you want to go through a playlist, but you don’t feel like cluttering your screen with the iTunes interface, you can just use Quicksilver. 

Evoke quicksilver, get iTunes up by typing in a few letters of it and right arrow into it, easy.

The Clipboard can also be very useful, you can turn on an option to capture the history of your clipboard. I personally save the last 100 items that I’ve copied or cut, it makes it easy to remember passwords or urls for things.

 To turn on the clipboard capturing, go to quicksilver’s preferences (command + ,) and go to clipboard on the sidebar of preferences, then tick the check box and decide how many things you want to save.

 

Clipboard savings are also searchable, which makes it even easier to get through things. Another addition to search is if you right arrow into another application such as textedit or preview, you’ll find the most recent things you’ve opened with that application. 

The Comma Trick 

 An easy way to get lists of things is to search them in quicksilver and then instead of opening them one at a time, click the comma (,) key and you’ll make a list of things to open. It makes light work of a lot of pictures if you want to resize them within quicksilver.

Application Proxies 

Quicksilver can get inside of applications to a very deep level, if you enable access to assistive devices in the universal access preference pane and enable advanced features within quicksilver.

Once you’ve got that all set up, turn on “proxy objects”, “internal commands” and “internal objects” on Quicksilver’s catalogue/quicksilver preference screen. Finally, to allow you to get these things to show through quicksilver, go to all plugins on the plugins page and turn on “user interface access (+)”

To set up the Application proxies as a command key, go to the triggers pane of Quicksilver’s preferences, make a new hotkey where the top pane shows “current application”, the second shows “show menu items” and where the third pane is blank. Hit save and you’re done, assign it to something useful. I use alt + space.

 

Filed under: Apple, Software