Software Shout-out: Quicksilver

Perhaps it is because I come from another time, or perhaps it is because I am impatient with myself, but the mouse has always taken a secondary role in my use of a computer. Rodents of any form (mice, trackballs, trackpoints, trackpads) may be good for spatial organisation but they’re clunky and slow for most of the work I do. When using Linux I tend to have a few dozen terminals open in a graphical environment, and will load whichever other programs I require from the command-line: typing is quicker and less error-prone that flicking through a tree of menu options.

When I switched to a Mac at the end of 2007 I immediately didn’t like the Applications “window” in Finder: it wasn’t static in size, things would rearrange themselves gradually, but at least typing something would tend to bring up the thing you wanted… except pressing the enter key didn’t do the obvious thing. Thankfully MacOS X has the Dock for launching applications, but even that was unsatisfactory: if I actually included all the applications I regularly use on the Dock then I would just give myself a spatial memory problem to start applications effectively. So when I stumbled upon Quicksilver I was absolutely delighted. Finally, here was something which complemented my way of working. Having learned the most basic and important use — launching applications — my productivity felt much increased.

Then I began to tinker with my environment slightly; not in the way that I used to tinker with a Linux environment back in the days when fvwm was the only capable window manager, but in ways which would make my MacBook more of a personal tool rather than just a personal computer. I had heard a lot of good things about AppleScript reading the likes of jwz’s LiveJournal, and Quicksilver was the beginnings of my picking up this automation language.

I now use Quicksilver to:

• generate passwords
• quickly open administration webpages
• mount encrypted volumes containing my clients’ data
• eject volumes which are buried under a mountain of covering windows
• change network location
• post Twitter entries
• do simple maths rather than starting a Python session