I’ve been a half-assed user of Quicksilver since it came out. Several of my friends were really impressed and immediately started incorporating it into their workflows, but I never really picked up on it. Lately, that’s starting to change.

I have a lot of stuff in my Applications folder. Even on my MacBook Pro’s 1920×1200 display, the dock would be severely cluttered if I actually had all of the stuff that I use fairly frequently on it. Instead of having a cluttered dock, I started launching things through Spotlight. This was a step in the right direction, because it saved me from going to the finder for Applications I used more rarely, and it’s easier than looking through a stack for the Applications folder. The only problem is that the spotlight search feels slow, since I’m comparing it to the the run menu in GNOME or Enlightenment. Quicksilver is fast. I find myself removing things from the dock unless I run them every time I log in, because running them through quicksilver is inevitably faster.

I am also enjoying Quicksilver’s ability to figure out what text is. Bringing up quicksilver, typing a url or an email address, and having a Safari or Mail.app window open is great. Putting ideas into DEVONthink—which I am just starting to use—is also pretty straightforward once you toggle the “switch to text mode if no match is found” option.

There’s a lot of power behind Quicksilver. Try it, and soon you’ll miss it wherever you don’t have it.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Geekery, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.