Quicksilver will change the way you use your computer. That is not a
claim to make lightly, but after using Quicksilver on my Mac for the
past eight years it is one that I can make in confidence. Learning
Quicksilver can take some time, but the payoff is worth the effort. My
goals here are to help you wrap your head around using an alternative
input and interaction mechanism, to empower you to speed through mundane
or repetitive tasks, and provide you the tools to stop thinking about
your computer and start using it. Quicksilver is an application
launcher, file browser, and much more.
I like to tell my kids that nothing worth doing is easy, and that every
accomplishment is first a challenge. Like learning to ride a bike. When
we first set out to ride a bike we are unsteady, off balance, and unsure
of ourselves. We make mistakes in judgment and pedal too lightly or not
at all, we hold on to the handlebars for dear life, mistakenly assuming
that if we just hold on tight enough we wont fall and skin our knee
again. But we do fall, and knees are skinned and elbows bruised… but we
get back up and try again. One day Dad lets go of the bike, in spite of
your pleading for him not to, and you roll on your own, you feel your
balance, press on the pedals, pumping one leg and then another, suddenly
sure, suddenly getting it. What seemed like a chore before is now
exhilarating, you can fly like the wind! Once you’ve learned you can’t
go back, and you never forget.
The reason you can jump on a bike and start to ride long after you last
got off is thanks to a type of memory commonly known as “muscle memory”.
It is the same reason you don’t forget how to walk, or, more to the
point, how to type. Using Quicksilver is like that; you use several
parts of your brain at once, and interact using at least two senses,
touch and sight.
Once actions become automatic, it frees higher thinking to allow you to
focus on the bigger picture of why you need a certain task done. You
want to open a TextEdit document so you can write out a grocery list;
you do not want to stop to think about where the text editor application
is, what it is named, or how to use it. Once you have TextEdit open, if
you are an experienced typist, the words can drop straight from your
mind onto the page because you know the feel of the keyboard, you know
where the keys that make the words you need to type are, you can think
at a high enough level to abstract away the need to “hunt and peck” for
individual letters.
Steve Jobs once told a
story of a story he read
in Scientific American that measured the efficiency of animals as they
travelled a kilometer. What they found was that human beings rated about
a third of the way down from the top, with the
Condor rating first. Luckily,
one of the researchers had the insight to measure a man on a bicycle,
and found that the ratio of speed to energy converted was way higher
than any other animal.
And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is… it’s
the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the
equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
Learning Quicksilver will make you faster and more efficient in your
everyday tasks. It will free up time for your brain to work on much
harder problems, and most importantly, it will make using your computer
fun maybe for the first time.
You may not see yourself as a craftsman, but if you care enough about
what you do to 1) use a Mac, and 2) be reading this post, I wager that
you may be the type of person who cares deeply about the tools they use.
Personally, I tend to gravitate towards a philosophy I like to call
“The Principle of Least
Software”.
The principle states that one should “use only the software that they
absolutely need, no more, and no less.” Using fewer applications, but
knowing them better, tends to allow a person to uncover hidden
functionality they didn’t know existed, boosting productivity and making
them a happier computer user. Part of being intimately familiar with
your tools is understanding not only the how and the why, but also the
what. So, while I’d like to dive right in to the how and why, first we
should take a look at the history of Quicksilver.
History
Some history for the application can be found on its [Wikipedia
page](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quic…, but the
section is quite brief. One interesting point is that the symbol for the
Quicksilver icon, ☿, comes from the alchemical
symbol for mercury,
which was once known as quicksilver. For years I wondered what that was.
Quicksilver began development in 2003, which is also the year I first
bought a Mac. In 2004 Merlin Mann first posted about appending to a
text
file
with Quicksilver, and was followed by tutorials and how-to
articles for years
from several other sites, including The Apple
Blog, where I was once a contributor.
Quicksilver was initially developed by Nicholas Jitkoff, known as Alcor,
and distributed as freeware. Merlin did an interview with
Alcor
in 2004, where he discussed the origins of Qucksilver.
Quicksilver started out as a module based applescript for OS 9 using a
healthy dose of AKUA
Sweets. It basically
supported drag and drop and performing of some basic actions and
scripts on the dropped items or the finder selection. It launched
stuff too, but was an unwieldy dialog of applications you had to sift
through. The initial point of it was to speed up day to day tasks like
emailing and file manipulation. It sometimes took longer to do stuff
using it than by hand, but was mostly a fun toy. The idea behind it
was sound, and that is what made it through to the OS X incarnation.
The focus has not changed since the beginning, but the implementation
has become far more flexible (though perhaps less reliable.)
Alcor did his best to keep Quicksilver current and add features as
requested, but slowly he began to fall behind. When Alcor was hired by
Google in 2006 or 2007 (I couldn’t find an exact date), Quicksilver
development slowed almost to a halt, and in November of 2006 the source
code was released.
The future for Qucksilver looked bleak. Although it had been released as
open source, no major progress was being made. Alcor gave an interview
to
Lifehacker
in December of 2007, where he stated:
I’m inclined to encourage users to move over to the more stable and
well supported alternatives like LaunchBar.
Mac OS X moved on, bugs accumulated, and hope for the once amazing
Quicksilver drifted away.
In 2010 a new group of developers adopted the stagnant Quicksilver code,
bought a new domain (qsapp.com), and started the long, arduous task of
breathing new life into the beloved app.
In the early months of 2011, several developers worked vigorously to
bring Quicksilver back to its former glory, and to what you see today.
The LoveQuicksilver site lists Patrick
Robertson, Rob
McBroom, and Philip
Dooher as the primary contributors
to the current iteration of the project. After years of work,
Quicksilver today is stable, powerful, and continuously updated. It has
once again gained the attention of third party
developers.
Alcor’s creation has gained a second life, thanks to his foresight in
releasing the code as open source. If he had kept it to himself, there
is little doubt that Quicksilver would have completely fallen out of use
by now.
Setup
Now that we understand a bit of how we got to where we are, let’s get
started.
Quicksilver can be downloaded from qsapp.com. Once
downloaded, drag and drop to the Applications folder from the disk image
just like any other Mac app. The first time Quicksilver is launched a
wizard will run asking for some basic information and suggesting a few
plugins to install. Accepting the defaults is fine, although I make one
change, I always remove the hotkey for Spotlight from the System
Preferences, and reassign “⌘ Space” to Quicksilver.
An aside. Quicksilver features are enabled through plugins, so you can
choose which features you want and which you do not need. This also
enables third party developers to add integration between Quicksilver
and their app. I currently have 22 plugins installed (although the white
bezel plugin I could do without).
Once the wizard is finished, you will be presented with the Quicksilver
bezel. This is where you think about what you want to do. Write an
email? Type “Mail”, then press return. Browse the web? Type “Safari”,
then press return. Open your Documents folder? Type “Documents”, then
press return. Easy. You don’t have to type the entire name of what you
want to interact with, just type enough to recognize the icon, then
press return. This is the most basic use of Quicksilver, but it barely
scratches the surface of what it can do.
It is good to use the app like this for a while. Get comfortable with
launching applications and browsing your files this way. Once you have ⌘
Space mapped in your mind to “doing something”, it is time to explore a
bit more of what it can do.
As I alluded to earlier, there have been many, many tutorials on how to
setup and use Quicksilver. Most recently, a pair by App Storm:
- Quicksilver: The Best Free Way to Do Everything With Just Your
Keyboard -
Link
- Mastering Quicksilver: The Basics -
Link
43 Folders still sports some of the best:
- Getting started (or reacquainted) with Quicksilver -
Link
- Classic “The Merlin Show” video on proxies -
Link
Merlin’s proxies video was a revelation for me. I still have Ctrl-Space
mapped to Current Application -> Show Menu Items.
- In fact, the entire 43 Folders archive on Quicksilver is well worth
perusing. - Link
- The Apple Blog (now part of GigaOm) published a series of tutorials
back in the day, including this list -
Link
Pick and choose at will, most tutorials, even the old ones, are still
valid.
Use
Quicksilver has become an integrated part of my workflow. I use it daily
for:
- Opening SSH sessions to servers
- Searching DuckDuckGo
- Searching Pinboard
- Launching applications
- Controlling iTunes
- Finding buried menu items
- Composing quick emailsand
- Setting reminders
I’m a systems administrator during the day, so launching new secure
shell sessions is something I do more times than I can count in the
course of a day. I also search DuckDuckGo, often using the bang
syntax to extend the search to other
sites. When searching DuckDuckGo, I use the Vi keyboard bindings to
navigation search results, which, nine times out of ten, means I never
need to move my hands from the keyboard to find the information that I’m
looking for from the time I decide I need to search till the time I
close the browser.
In the keyboard preferences, I have the checkbox for “Use all F1, F2,
etc. keys as standard function keys” checked. I then remap F7 - F12 to
control iTunes forward, play/pause, next, and volume. I also use the
main Quicksilver bezel to start playing playlists.
Quicksilver is deep; the more I use it the more of it’s capabilities I
use. My latest example is browsing Safari history and bookmarks using a
slightly different setting in the Spacebar behavior. In Quicksilver
preferences, the Preferences pane (yes, I know), and Command, the second
section is labeled “Search”, and the first option is “Spacebar
behavior”. I set the spacebar to “Show Item’s Contents”, which lets me
pull up Safari, hit the spacebar twice, and start typing to search my
history. I find this to be a better option that having Safari’s history
as part of the general catalog because I don’t like having my initial
search results being unnecessarily cluttered.
This trick doesn’t just work with Safari; any application that keeps a
history of documents, or includes a plugin, should work.
Understanding Quicksilver requires a bit of a change to your mental
model of how you interact with your computer. The work is well worth the
effort though, the payoff comes when you start calling Quicksilver
without even thinking about it, flying through tasks that once slowed
you down. It is like the difference in learning to type, where once you
used to hunt and peck, and now your fingers simply know where to go.
It’s also a bit like learning to ride a bike.
