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Intermediate Quicksilver tutorial

Merlin Mann | Feb 23 2005

Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog: Quicksilver: From A Better OS X To Even More

Dan Dickinson wrote the tutorial that inspired me to first try Quicksilver, lo, those eleven epochal months ago (via Todd). It’s now my favorite app on the Mac, partly because of (or in spite of) the fact that it continues to yield the 10,000 secret functions hiding in its many alcoves.

Dan’s new tutorial is an equally swell intermediate lesson that walks you through some of the sexier features in a clear, unintimidating manner.

Here’s an answer to one that’s been confusing me a bit for a while now:

Step #8 - Shift Can Be Better Than Tab

There’s a very small preference stashed away in the Advanced pane, entitled “Capitalized keys modify action in command window”. This lets you effectively type into both halves of the QS window at the same time. I find it much easier to type as one long string than breaking everything up with tabs - “safariKILL” is easier than “safari (tab) kill”. Given how most people are pretty adept at hitting the shift key while they type, this may be faster for you. Give it a try.

Nice work, Dan.

Not sure I’ve ever asked here, so spill: What’s your favorite novel use for Quicksilver? What place has it found in your workflow?

27 Comments
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TOPICS: Apple, Macs & OS X, Mac OS X, Quicksilver, Tips, Tricks
JoshD's picture

I've just gone and played...

Submitted by JoshD (not verified) on February 23, 2005 - 3:41pm.

I've just gone and played a bit with the folder trick, and have the following to report:

  • In Safari, works fine so long as you have the "tab" option checked as Jeff noted. (First thing I do on any new mac, so I forgot to mention it.)

  • FIrefox will always open a new tab, instead of reloading a tab previously opened with that same bookmark. (This, plus other mild annoyances, has kept me using Safari on the mac.)

  • The latest build of Camino doesn't work properly with this, because of the following behavioral disorder: If you open a link in a new tab with Camino, and then try to load another link via QS before that tab is done loading, Camino replaces the currently-loading tab with your QS bookmark. Thus, you will try to open a folder of seven bookmarks in QS, and get two tabs in Camino. This sucks, because I otherwise quite like the later builds of Camino.

  • You can browse your Safari bookmarks by right-arrowing into Safari, or by bringing up one of your common folders and quickly tapping "right-arrow, left-arrow," which is a simple trick to start browsing the location of anything you find in Safari.

  • What is really needed to get all of this across is screen capture video. Finally, a use for that copy of Snapz Pro that came with my machine lo these many moons ago...

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