Quicksilver User’s Guide
October 6, 2006
Web Pages Here’s another hidden feature in Quicksilver. If the object is a web page, (i.e., a bookmark, URL, or HTML page in the filesystem) you can type → to fill an object pane results list with all the links on that page. No there isn’t a > in the results list but it still works. It can be a little slow if it has to get the page from a remote machine, particularly if the page is large. For each link in the page there are two lines shown. The first is the text of the link and the second is the URL. If the link is on an image, there is no title but instead a very scaled down version of the image is shown. I’m not sure how useful it actually is. In the example at right I’m browsing the Quicksilver online documentation I can get to links marked Tutorials and Overview, but there is a lot of other stuff in there and it’s a little awkward to browse. Still if you know you’re looking for Tutorials you can just type it in and Quicksilver will match it. If you wanted to send someone the URLs of an FAQ you could open the site and type → to navigate into it, type faq and then tab to choose the Paste action. This seems like a very cool feature in search of a good use case.
Web Searches For this section you’ll need to make sure you have the Web Search module installed in the Plugins Preferences pane. There are no configuration options in the plug-in. In the catalog under modules you’ll find “Web Searches (from docs.blacktree.com)” listed. Check the box to add all the listed web searches (currently 327 of them) to your catalog. The list of web searches is also at this web page. Also in the Add Custom Source drop down you’ll find an option to add your own custom web searches to the catalog. To perform a Web Search you select the search by name in the object pane (e.g., “Quicksilver” or “google”). The action should default to Search For... so type return (or tab twice) to get to the third pane to type your search terms. Type return and your browser pops up with the results. If Search For... isn’t the default action, make it be so by finding it in the results list (while in the action pane) and ⌃-clicking (or right-clicking) and choosing “Make Default”. I found I used some searches (“Google”, “Wikipedia”, “Amazon”, and “IMDB”) a lot and I wanted to get to them very quickly, with just a single letter. You could type the letter you want to use, find the item in the results list and ⌃-click (or right-click) and choose “Set as Default for “letter””. I found for amazon I wanted to use the letter z but it was further down in the results list than I was willing to scroll, so I found another way to do it (there’s always another way in Quicksilver). First I brought up the amazon search in the object pane. Then instead of using the default action I chose Assign Abbreviation and in the third pane entered z. Now I have one letter access to my common searches.
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