Apple Mac OSX - Quicksilver making life a little easier

I’m still a n00b as far as OSX is concerned. One thing I must thank Henk Kleynhans for is that he introduced me to Quicksilver. What an amazing little application!

Quicksilver is often seen as a Spotlight replacement. My first comment to Henk was “but its the same as Spotlight”. Ha, was I wrong! Yes, there is some striking similarities, but Quicksilver goes far beyond launching your applications or opening your documents.

Here is a perfect example of its usefulness. This is a function I use ALL the time. OSX have a great dictionary application. It is vast and powerful and pretty useful. Ever so often I get to a web site where there is an English word I simply don’t know. Now I first have to open the dictionary application and search for the word before I get to know what it is. Fortunately for me, Quicksilver integrates beautifully with the dictionary application. All you do is the following:

You enter the Quicksilver hotkey (in my case it is Command + Spacebar) to launch it:

You type a . to tell Quicksilver that it is text you are entering and it must not search for an application or something else. Right after the . you type or paste your word (if you copied it).

You press the tab key to move to the second block and type dictionary. Note that you would probably get to dic before the dictionary application icon appears. The more you use it, the more Quicksilver will “know” that you want dictionary. On my Mac, when I type d it already knows I want the dictionary. Once the dictionary icon shows you press enter.

And Viola! it opens up a small window with the dictionary explanation of the word you don’t know!

Initially I thought that it is slower than simply launching the dictionary or keeping it open and entering the word and search for it. Initially I was right BUT once you get into the keystrokes it simply cannot be beaten!

If you want this functionality though, you need to install the Dictionary Quicksilver plug-in. It is as easy as pi. Open your Quicksilver control panel, go to Plug-ins and tick the Dictionary tickbox. There. All. Is. Good!

As you can see there is quite a few plug-ins and I would probably do more of this soon!

PS: Dumbass me went and highlighted the Developer plug-in. Soz!

2 Comments to "Apple Mac OSX - Quicksilver making life a little easier"

• QuickSilver Proxy Objects at ::thoughtstorm.org:: said: On 10/09/2007 at 9:38 pm

  [...] recently posted a rather nifty trick for using the QuickSilver Dictionary plugin to search for a definition without [...]

• Henk Kleynhans said: On 11/05/2007 at 11:33 am

  That’s awesome! Didn’t even know about that! I use the dictionary a lot, but normally through F12, then need to click on it first to type…

  Definitely going to save time… I love the combination of “learning” (typically command line) and “intuition” (typically GUI) that QuickSilver provides. Combine the two, and you can be quicker than a command line geek but without masses of complex commands!

Spit it out!

Filed in: Apple stuff, Kick-ass Tools by: Stii