Running Multiple Quicksilver Commands with 1 Trigger

Posted by Simon in Apple, Tips with No Responses Yet

While Quicksilver is phenomenally powerfull, there are some limitations. One of the most frustrating is the inability to chain commands together. And when I say commands, I’m not talking about the individual panes in Quicksilver, but the fully blown, all singing, all dancing actions. For example, in my five things that make Quicksilver Awesome post I used the example of selecting, resizing and compressing images in single command. What if you could chain loads of these together? Wow, think of the power. Well luckily, Quicksilver has you covered, it’s just not a straight forward as it should be.

There are three basic principals I’ll use to achieve this, the comma trick, converting commands to objects and saving commands. A word of warning though, it all gets a bit meta.

  Your starting point should be an aim. What do you want to do? While this is an exceptionally cool trick, you need to have a use for it.  One of the uses I’ve found for this trick is to set up a web development environment.  I can open up TextMate, Transmit and a web page in not one, but two urls.  All with one trigger.  With this being Quicksilver, it wouldn’t taken that long to do these seperately, but the coolness factor of this approach is off the chart.

So onto the method.  This crux of this trick is using saved Quicksilver commands.  You can create a saved Quicksilver command by completing the steps required (object and action, for example typing the url you want to open in the first pane and then the open command in the second), but instead of hitting return to perform the action, hold down control and press return.  Your original command then fills the first pane and you get some new options available in the second pane.  Effectively, your command becomes an object.  One of these new options that become available is to save the command, which is what we’ll be using.  One important point to note here though, you MUST tab into the third pane to specify a location in order to save a command, else it won’t work (and doesn’t give any indication that it hasn’t worked).

So now, you should have a .qscommand file named roughly after the command you created.  You can create as many of these as you like.  Each of these individual qscommand files can be double clicked to run the saved command or, crucially, be invoked through Quicksilver itself.  You may be wondering at this point how this helps us, after all Quicksilver can only do one thing at a time.  Well yes, that’s true.  But while it can only do one thing at a time, it can do it to multiple objects.  The secret to this is the comma trick, as pointed out in Merlin Mann’s 43 folders blog.  All you have to do is locate the first qscommand file in Quicksilver and instead of tabbing into the next pane, enter a comma (,).  This allows you to “stack” multiple objects within Quicksilver, which then allows you to perform an action on all of them.  Usually this restricts you as you have to perform the same action, but using the qscommand files, you can set it up to perform a wide variety of tasks.  If you find yourself doing a number things in quick succession, over and over again, this is trick is for you.

A couple of warnings.  Firstly, to get any real benefit out of this approach you will want to set up a trigger for opening all the qscommand files.  Otherwise you’ll have to manually find and select all the qscommand files each time.  You can set up a trigger under the “Triggers” pane in Quicksilver Preferences.  Secondly, when I said at the beginning that the actions are performed at the same time, I literally meant it.  Simultaneously.  Therefore, if you are planning on using it to perform some processor heavy tasks, such as firing Photoshop, you may end up taxing your processor more than you would like.  Of course, with today’s multi core intel CPUs, this isn’t a huge problem, just don’t plan on doing anything else at the same time.   The third, and final warning, is that I’ve not seen this approach anywhere else, it appears to be new so use at your own risk and your mileage may vary.  Buyer beware and all that.  If you have any success using this trick, can come up with something better or have a particularly good use for this approach, be sure to share it in the comments.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like 5 Hidden OSX Gems, Why OSX is an Unbeatable Web Development Platform and 5 Cool things you can do with Automator and Apple Script.

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