Pull the trigger
written by Stuart on March 10th, 2006
The world loves quicksilver. That's a fact, it is an incredibly powerful way of doing pretty much anything you like with your mac. Usually, you just give quicksilver a few letters, it brings back a list of matches (quicker than spotlight) and you can then perform any number of actions on said item, be it launching an application, composing an email or adding spotlight comments to a group of files. The possibilities really are more limited by imagination than quicksilvers capabilities. Thing is, you might find yourself going through this process for the same result over and over again, and for just this scenario, quicksilver allows you to create triggers, which will perform your desired action by just entering your chosen key combination.
My first reason to create a trigger was to aid my productivity. I have iTunes belting out at all times when I'm sitting at my machine. I have synergy loaded up to control tracks from the menubar and display track info and cover-art. The only problem with that is that when I'm head down ploughing through an assload of code, I don't really want to move away from my document, or have to start using the mouse. The solution was really simple, create four triggers via quicksilver. Previous, Next, Stop and Play/Pause.
now all I need to do is ctrl+arrow to do the things which before required me to stop what I was doing for a couple of seconds. Also, sometimes iTunes can seem like it knows exactly what I don't want to listen to, and drags up all that stuff in the shuffle, so next I created a trigger to play my top rated playlist with just a single key press, in this case F16. So with these triggers I no longer need to consult the iTunes window at all. I keep synergy running because I like its track info bezel, so with that, and my trigger finger at the ready, I'm good to go.
The next triggers I created were some nice shortcuts to the folders I'm always navigating to in the finder, so now with a quick cmd+D I'm in browsing documents, likewise for navigating to my downloads folder. I'm sure there are other things I can create triggers for, but just these ones alone are probably saving me something like an hour a day, which I guess means I can stay in bed an hour longer!
Very nice Stuard, I’ve wondered about quicksilver for a while now and I wasn’t incredibly clued up on how it could be used to my advantage since I’m a spotlight surfer.
Well covered article, I enjoyed the read. Keep ‘em comin’!