pooks,

If you use the program Text Edit, then be sure to first open the Text Edit preferences and click on the button under Format that says Plain Text (from the default of Rich Text). Somebody more knowledgeable than me can tell you about the differences between rich text and plain text (and for that matter the multiple different Plain Text formats such Unicode vs Western. I just use the default of Western (Mac OS X), and I haven't had any problems. Then again, I don't use text for anything advanced such as Markdown or Unix coding. For the append QS trick, just follow the instructions on that above link, and it should all go find, let us know how it goes.

Regarding learning to use QS, I've found that you need to retrain yourself for a lot of the features. For app launching, just hide the dock (you can hide the dock in several different ways including by hitting option-apple-d or going under the apple menu in the top left or go the dock system preferences or right click on that divider bar in the dock). With the dock hidden, you'll find yourself using QS more often. Actually, a while back I posted a hint to Mac OS X Hints about how to use your computer without the dock. I was using a similar program to QS back then (launch bar), and the author of QS actually emailed me and suggested I tried QS - which is the first I had heard of it.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040315043002807

(although that's an old article, most of it still applies. Except I use dashboard in instead of konfabulator, also regarding the link to the hint about remapping the expose key to the enter key - for that you need to do something slightly different since they have changed the format of the plist files.) the updated hint on how to do that is here:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050801052917667&lsrc=osxh