Quicksilver Tip – Quicksilver as an App Switcher

Like pretty much every OSX user out there, I’m a huge fan of Quicksilver.  I’ve written about it on this very blog numerous times before.  There’s one aspect of Quicksilver I’ve failed to mention so far, and it’s something that I use every single day.  To put it simply, you can use Quicksilver as an application switcher, as well as a launcher.  This is particularly usefull is, like me, you have lots of applications open at the same time.  Instead of alt-tabbing through them, or using the excellent expose (which is only usefull to a point), you can just invoke Quicksilver and use it to call up the app you want to switch to.  If its already open, your view will switch to it (even across spaces), if it’s not, Quicksilver will launch it.

It’s probably worth pointing out that this is down to the way OSX handles applications.  If you have an application open and you try to open it again, OSX will just switch to the current window for that application.  This differs from other operating systems which try to relaunch, or launch another copy of the application.  Essentially this means that any method of launching an application in OSX can also be used to switch to a currently running application.  So that’s the Application Folder, the Dock, shortcuts, aliases, Quicksilver and anything else you can think of.