Brontojoris

Came here because I was looking for any tips for integrating Interarchy more closely with QuickSilver and couldn’t help but comment.

In response to Sam’s comments:

So after a week of using QuickSilver I do like it, I can understand why people like it, the extra stuff is wicked cool, but after two weeks I’m going back to LaunchBar. Probably the main reason is speed and learning. LaunchBar is way faster then QuickSilver. For me it is almost always instant, quicksilver is slowing me down (part of this I know is because I am more used to LaunchBar) it takes a while for it to come to the front, it takes a while to list the choices, and it doesn’t seem to learn that ‘int’ is short for interarchy …

First up, while QuickSilver does learn which items are your favorites based on how often you choose them, you can also ‘teach’ Quicksilver which items to list first by typing your letters and then right-clicking on an item and choose ‘Set a default’ or ‘Reduce score’

After having done that with a few of my favorite programs, I can now type RD for ‘Remote Desktop Connection’, V gets me Chicken of the VNC, VL returns Video Lan Player and so on.

Second, Quicksilver is much, much faster if you take the time to setup your Catalogue. I chose my Applications, Download, Music, Documents, Sites, and Pictures folders. It is also very worthwhile to turn off the Actions you don’t use. I actually only have about 20 Actions ticked out of 125.

If you’re really picky you can also choose which filetypes are returned for each Custom Folder in your Catalogue. For the Applications I have ‘application’ .app, and .fold = folders. Sites has .php, .cfm, .html, .gif, .jpg, .swf, etc. Downloads has .zip, .sit, .fold, .img etc. This helps reduce junk matches like xml files in your iTunes catalogue, or html help file from your Applications catalogue. It sounds like a lot of work but these tweaks were done over several months as I started to learn the program and really make it work to my style.

Finally, it is definitely worth taking a look at the Flashlight interface. It looks just like Spotlight, only on the left hand side, and shows how QuickSilver is probably what Spotlight/Snotlight should have been.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 5:36 am and is filed under Kitchen Sink, Widgets. 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.