Quicksilver is hands down the mac application that I can’t live without. When I sit down at a computer, hit ctrl+space and nothing happens, it makes me sad on the inside. Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining its usefulness. It can launch programs, manipulate files, and run scripts for you with minimum effort. Once you get in the habit of using it, you’ll wonder how you did without. Ask my friend Dane whom I introduced to quicksilver.

Frank Uyeda AKA “FU” once pointed out to me that you can use spotlight to launch programs as well. While true, spotlight is slower, often finds more depth than you need, and only lets you open those files; with quicksilver you can act on those files.

To use quicksilver, you open it with a hotkey (ctrl+space by default), then select an action, and then select a target action if applicable all with a few keystrokes. You would be surprised how much faster it is than your mouse Here’s some examples:

Trashing a file:

opening a file with a specific application:

I should note here that you can set quicksilver to scan certain directories. I set it to scan my home directory so i can access anything in there with quicksilver.

Lots of applications also have quicksilver plugins so you can access their contents with quicksilver. Say you’re itching for a song in itunes. You don’t have to switch over to itunes and find it, you can just use quicksilver:

Quicksilver also learns, so it gets better at guessing what you’re trying to do. Firefox is my most opened application starting with f, so to launch it, I only have to hit ctrl+space to open quicksilver, type f, which selects firefox, and then hit enter to launch it.

This is really just the surface. Here are some more articles and tutorials about quicksilver. Try it out, you’ll like it.

Next, I’ll show you how quicksilver an growl fit into my every day music listening.