Quicker Slicker Quicksilver

20 June 2005

If you use a Mac but haven’t heard of Quicksilver yet, you’re wasting clicks and keystrokes. It is the equivalent of ActiveWords in the Windows world, but with a host of community-contributed plugins and a deep framework for customization.

In fact, I used this framework to remedy something that was bothering me once I became better acquainted with Quicksilver: lack of browser-independent web searches. If you have been frustrated by not being able to use a browser other than Safari, OmniWeb, or Internet Explorer to display the results of Quicksilver Google searches, check out the AppleScript at the end of this article.
Quicksilver recommends creating a special bookmark to use as your method of displaying web searches. While Firefox users can download an additional plugin to catalog their Firefox bookmarks, using browser bookmarks to launch searches is still just a bit clunky, requiring three columns in Quicksilver to perform a search.

I decided it would be more elegant to let the user specify which browser to use at the operating system level, and found that in doing so I could simplify the process so that I only type four additional keystrokes (besides the invocation of Quicksilver and the search term itself) to get my search results displayed in the browser of my choice.

The resulting AppleScript should be placed in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/ . If the “Actions” folder does not exist, create it. Then refresh the catalog using command-; then command-r (then command-w to close the preferences window).

From here, the sequence to get a Google search done is period (to enter static text mode), then the text to search, then tab, then ‘g’, then enter. Quick, painless Googling thanks to the flexible architecture of Quicksilver.

download qs_action_google.tar.gz

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Posted in Mac, Productivity | Comments (11)

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  • Robert

    After a brief discussion on the Quicksilver Forums, it looks like there IS in fact a browser-independent way to do searches:

    http://forums.blacktree.com/viewtopic.php?p=11434

    enable the “Web Searches” module for browser-independent (not to mention search-engine-independent) searching. I’ll still use my AppleScript for speed, but nice to know QuickSilver isn’t bound to the clunky bookmark-based approach.

  • http://www.mymacblog.com Dennis Metzcher

    Excellent script! Solved all my problems.
    Also, I love how it can be customized to use other search engines.

    I had to write about this, and link to you.

    Thanks!

  • Robert

    Thanks, Dennis. Glad you’re finding it useful!

  • Hardy

    If you change this line:

    set theUrl to “http://www.google.com/search?q=” &

    to this:

    set theUrl to “http://www.google.com/search?btnI=&q=”

    You do an “I feel lucky” search. I’ve copied your google.scpt and named it “goto”. Very easy way to get somewhere without remembering (or even knowing) an exact URL.

    You’ll have to try it to really appreciate it. Try feeding it the name of your nearest public library. Or the name of your favorite opensource project.

  • Robert

    Great tip, thanks!

  • http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/ranter/ Dave Everitt

    Thanks for the script – handy! I use QS daily and coudn’t imagine OS X without it, but you’ll see from my blog that getting started wasn’t exactly a whirlwind romance :-( . I also recently uninstalled KinklessGTD as I just couldn’t grasp the way it worked (I need to things to work right away or I lose patience!), and had read of some instabilities. Pity, as I still use Backpack, but haven’t got round to working out how to get QS to add to specific to-do lists, which is the functionality I really need to speed things up.

  • Robert

    Thanks for stopping by, Dave. Glad you found the script useful.

    I tried Kinkless, and my estimation was that a lot of the clunkiness stemmed from it trying to do things best suited to a relational data structure in a non-relational system. The result is that you have to “sunc” — not between desktop app and PDA as you’d expect, but between project and task lists. All that copying from list to list just seemed to slow me down.

    The one that looks promising now is ThinkingRock, but I’m still on 10.3, waiting for Leopard so I don’t have to waste money on Tiger. I got this far…

  • Dave Everitt

    I agree about kGTD. I’m still using Basecamp (rather than the Backpack solution here:
    http://www.whatsthenextaction.com/pivot/entry.php?id=7002&w=whats_the_next_action
    I like the look of ThinkingRock and may try it, but I like my stuff to be online.

    With this in mind, I found a nice implementation called ‘Tracks’ (http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/) written in Ruby on Rails that will run on any machine or server, and I’m also attracted to the geeky simplicity of PyGTD which is similarly platform-agnostic (http://96db.com/pyGTD/)

    I’ll let you know how I get on with these!

  • Robert

    Thanks, Dave. Even with AJAX and a system running on localhost, I find some online solutions a little slow to respond. My ideal scenario is a desktop app that synchronizes via WebDAV or similar for browser-based access when needed.

  • http://ecoconsulting.co.uk Dave Everitt

    Gah! After a few years’ worth of fiddling with many, many on- and off- and onANDoff-line apps, I’ve gone back to… PAPER! That’s right. For me, I reckon if I need online apps to store my stuff, it’s an indication that I’m doing too much.

  • Robert

    Dave, no shame in paper. Seriously–do what works! :)