
QuickSilver for Mac Lives - GeneralMaximus
http://lovequicksilver.com/post/4658001693/quicksilver-lives-again
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justinchen
I've moved on to Alfred. <http://www.alfredapp.com/>

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greattypo
I installed Alfred on Sunday, and am trying to adjust.

For all of the Alfred-switchers in here - does anyone else find the folder
navigation pretty unintuitive? Or am I doing it wrong?

LaunchBar / QS's approach: Type "Documents" to bring up folder, use up & down
to select things, and left or right arrows to drill into them. Typing anything
searches everything within the current folder. So intuitive to me!

Alfred: "Documents" brings up folder, Command+Down(?) to open it. Then use up
& down to select things, and Command+Down to drill in. If you want to say,
open a folder in Finder, you have to hit Command+O or "Enter" and "Enter". You
can search but only by the first letters in the filename (not "pdf") .

So for your converts - what's the deal, do you prefer this style, am I doing
it wrong, or do you just get used to it..?

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msbarnett
I couldn't adjust. Alfred may not be trying to be Quicksilver, but where it
does go its own way it feels actively worse.

Everything in QS is very regular, Object-Verb style interaction with fuzzy
completion of both. Alfred has a wartier, more irregular interaction model:
it's Verb-Object if you want to type the verb, but it seems to push you into
command key combos, which operate on a Object-Verb basis, and there doesn't
feel like much logic as to what's available as what.

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carterschonwald
the object then verb description precisely describes what is nice and uniform
about QS, thanks for articulating it so clearly!

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greattypo
Really glad to see this picked up!

I know Quicksilver has had some false starts before..

<http://lipidity.com/apple/cleaning-up-quicksilver/>

<http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/updates/list>

<http://www.43folders.com/2008/07/08/quicksilver-update>

I'm curious - are these efforts building on each other, or is everyone
starting from scratch each time?

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p0ppe
I changed to LaunchBar (<http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/>) about a
year ago. No complaints so far and I also like supporting an independent
developer.

~~~
guns
I was hesitant to move to LaunchBar because it didn't support Quicksilver's
Triggers feature. Then I found Spark Daemon:

<http://www.shadowlab.org/Software/spark.php>

It's an excellent free (but not open source) and complete Triggers replacement
that has none of the bugs of Quicksilver's implementation.

Once I had a keyboard shortcut manager, I was happy to switch to LaunchBar,
whose author, among other things, is also the creator of Little Snitch, an
amazing interactive outbound firewall.

~~~
lukifer
Thanks for the tip, LaunchBar's inability to handle snippets has been my only
complaint.

I loved me some QuickSilver in days of yore, but I'll never switch back;
LaunchBar is too excellent, and it's burned into my brain at this point. :)

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ionfish
I just switched back to Quicksilver after trying Alfred for a bit. The basic
reason was that Quicksilver's search is better and more easily customised: it
finds the things I'm looking for, and given that the whole point of using such
things is to improve one's productivity (by cutting out the whole "Open
Finder, dig down through the file hierarchy, finally manage to open the file,
directory or application being searched for" process), it doesn't really
matter to me how well its competitors do in other areas.

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mambodog
For me, cmd+space (Spotlight) has been quite sufficient, and it's right there
out of the box.

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bostonvaulter2
Personally I don't like the delay while spotlight is searching before I get to
actually launch something. It's pretty decent though.

~~~
strmpnk
These days I can't tell the difference in speed between QS and Spotlight. Lion
will also make that a bit faster and each entry a little nicer. I do miss the
"verb" concept in QS, but I'd rather than it'd do a spotlight search and then
overlay on that instead of implement it's own index.

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beck5
I have found Alfred a very polished alternative and a little more robust than
quicksilver has been over the past couple of years.

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phren0logy
I have enjoyed the fact that Alfred doesn't crash, but it seems much worse at
interpreting abbreviations. For example, with no training QuickSilver took me
to TextMate by typing "tm," where Alfred still has trouble with this. I also
considered LaunchBar. It looks very nice, but I cannot justify the price for
my use given the alternatives.

~~~
vpepperrell
There's two ways you can do this with Alfred:

1\. Turn on fuzzy matching in the preferences under Applications (with or
without anchoring, as you prefer)

2\. Create a Spotlight Comment if you want to call it something completely
different (e.g. label all your browsers with the keyword "browser" to launch
them all at once) More on Spotlight comments here:
<http://help.alfredapp.com/features/applications/>

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glenjamin
For the uninitiated, what does this do that spotlight doesn't?

The mac is the only platform where I _haven't_ felt the need for a decent
launcher app!

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hyperbovine
You can't do the <object> <verb> thing. I agree though, the "death" of
Quiksilver for me was when Apple introduced Spotlight in 10.5. 90% of what I
used QS for was opening files, folders and apps.

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alanh
For clarity, Spotlight was not new in 10.5, but rather was optimized to list
applications first & fastest.

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snewe
Download link: <http://qsapp.com/download.php>

~~~
patrickod
thank you! I couldn't find a download link on the page. Doesn't seem to be
listed which is weird.

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krosaen
too bad the spinoff project within google, Quick Search Box (same guy who
started quick silver was involved), didn't really ever gain traction and has
not been actively developed in a while, it had promise:

<http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac>

~~~
narkee
Actually the Quick Search Box maintainer (dmaclach) posted on Google Groups
that Quick Search Box is basically dead in the water, and no longer funded by
Google. Apparently most of the former team are now working on Chrome:

[http://groups.google.com/group/qsb-mac-
discuss/msg/ded590b8b...](http://groups.google.com/group/qsb-mac-
discuss/msg/ded590b8b6a89375)

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jh3
It's been "living." This is just an update, correct?

~~~
stevejohnson
From what I understand, the last official update was several years ago, so
this really is news.

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fjw
I've stuck with QuickSilver throughout, just because it's what I am used to
and most comfortable using. Compared to the other apps that I have tried
(Alfred, Spotlight), QuickSilver seems to get the most done with the least
amount of effort -- it's simple to learn, harder to master, yet still
extremely intuitive.

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dedward
That's good news - does anyone else know what to do about the problem with the
Shelf plugin and the Shelf popping up unwanted all the time? (whenever windows
or apps are closed, perhaps even when they are opened sometimes, sometimes
when quicksilver is invoked - very flaky)

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dedward
Note this wasn't unique to this version - it's been going on for, err, years.

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blaenk
Anyone know if I have to have a plugin installed to use the "Latest Download"
and other proxy objects? Nothing seems to come up for me when I type that.

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angusgr
If anyone's looking for alternatives on other platforms, I find "GNOME Do"
quite good on GNOME/Linux and "Launchy" is decent for Windows.

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rtaycher
It doesn't work quite the same way but krunner is also quite nice.

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navs
Don't forget Kupfer <http://kaizer.se/wiki/kupfer/>

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lovskogen
I'm just doing QS for the global shortcuts, anyone know of a native way of
launching apps from keyboard shortcuts?

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evilduck
Besides Spotlight (Cmd-Space, start typing the app name), System
Preferences->Keyboard->Keyboard Shortcuts. You can define key combos to launch
apps.

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lovskogen
To launch apps, not adding shortcuts inside apps? How?

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amanuel
Glad to see QS getting updates. The new plugins are welcome...well they are
new to me (QRCode and Viscosity)

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shubhamgoel
great.. but I have switched to alfred and love it

