Quicksilver: A Guide For Normal People
Now I’m going to teach you how to install and set up Quicksilver. Once we’re done here, you will be ready to use it every day, and almost immediately, you will wonder how you ever got by in OSX without it.
This goes for all of you — but this article is specifically for those of you that have never heard of it (heretofore arbitrarily referred to, for the sake of clarity, as “normal people”). The rest of you can do what I did and slog through one of the dozen or so instructionals online.
I am forewarning you: This article will be long, but that’s because I’m making it easy. Fear not! I’ll walk you through every step — this is a guide for laypeople such as yourself, and it’s based precisely upon my personal experiences with slogging through the aforementioned tutorials.
Alright, enough hype-talk. Let’s answer the first question:
What is Quicksilver?
Well, it’s mysterious, for some reason, and it just shouldn’t be. Blacktree (the people responsible) describe it as “A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.” Zzzzz. You probably checked out around the word “extensible”, and I don’t blame you.
However, maybe that’s as clear as it gets: it’s true, Quicksilver is an interface. It’s kind of like a Spotlight (you know, command-space on your keyboard) that can also perform actions — like “email this item” or “open this item in X program.” So it doesn’t just search; Quicksilver searches, and then it can act.
However, Quicksilver’s greatest weakness (at least to non-power users) is that it’s too powerful — it really can do all sorts of stuff. You can do things using Quicksilver that aren’t necessarily any quicker or better than doing them the regular way. That’s a very subjective call, though — so for this article I’m limiting the Quicksilver techniques to the ones I personally use day-to-day.
That said, you and I aren’t looking for a tool that can do anything — our goal is to have a tool that can make your computer easier to use, period. Fortunately, we can easily mold Quicksilver into just that.
Um, okay. What can Quicksilver do for me?
When we finish, you’ll be equipped with the following:
- The ability to launch applications with a single keystroke
- A slim, trim dock that only shows what programs you have running
- A near-instant search tool that knows to look at ONLY the files (and bookmarks) you care about (like a custom Spotlight search)
- A quick, easy way to resize images for email (without Photoshop)
- And just for fun, a calculator and a dictionary.
Even if that doesn’t sound like much, trust me, it’ll change the way you interact with your computer from now on.