O, Quicksilver, that little minx. The way she hides her functionality in coquettish little corners vexes and delights me. Did you know, for example, friends, how much you can do with Quicksilver and your modest arrow keys? Me neither. Til now.

So, quick review: once invoked, Quicksilver primarily uses the arrow keys to let you navigate through hierarchies and sets of matches. Up and down arrows let you surf sibling contents of a given directory or catalog, while the left and right arrows allow you to drill down and back up out of hierarchical levels, such as nested folders and the like. (Related tip: you can also surf up and down most any hierarchy using / and Shift-/)

All easy enough, right? But did you ever try clicking the right arrow key with an application selected? Well, you should.

OSXCon | Merlin Mann

Danny and I had a great time doing our talk yesterday at O’Reilly’s OSXCon. Met a bunch of great people and enjoyed the chance to hang with like-minded nerds. I love that people want to show me their squirrely productivity setups. Time management pr0n! Totally into it.

Our time for the session just flew by, so we didn’t have the time we would have liked to spend with all the apps. If you were there (or just like to play with OS X apps), here are links to all the things we talked about (or planned to talk about). If I left anything off or you have any questions, feel free to leave comments.

Thanks to Derrick and Vee for all their hard work, and thanks to everyone who showed up, asked questions, and just said hi. Stay in touch.

• TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X - Text editor with interesting shell integration
• Daring Fireball: Markdown - Turn structured txt into valid XHTML
  • HumaneText.service - Txt to HTML and back again, as an OS X Service
• Quicksilver - Application launcher and much more
• nondeterministic . net : hack : fiwt - Incremental search for Safari pages
• michael-mccracken.net - [i-search] - Incremental search in many Cocoa text fields
• Notational Velocity - Sexy note-taking and incremental search in one nerd-friendly app
• Welcome to Flying Meat Software, home of VoodooPad - Wiki comes to your Mac’s desktop
• PithHelmet - Filter ads, apply styles, and protect your privacy, per-site
• Welcome to Growl! - Notification program lets you know what’s happening under the bonnet
• Tynsoe projects - [GeekTool] - Make your Desktop look like “The Matrix” with notifications, photos, and shell output
• Safari Enhancer - Flip on the debug menu and more
• Bonus - Here’s the modest “hamburger helper” html file I use as a snippet in TextMate

Also—since a bunch of folks had asked—the Finder replacement app you saw in the demos is Path Finder. It’s a terrific, super-functional app that adds tons of features to speed up your work flow.

I really like the idea behind "List Your Way Out Of Stuckness"--particularly that notion of breaking your tasks into smaller and smaller pieces. I also just like the word “stuckness.”

Use your del.icio.us inbox. It's a great way to keep up with your friends and your favorite topics.

Wrote this long-winded post to the TextMate list, so I thought I’d repurpose it here. Just quick tips on adding metadata to your text files and—because I’m a dull and repetitive scold—using controlled vocabularies to keep your stuff searchable.