Quicksilver takes some getting used to, and at first you won’t be quite sure why it’s useful at all, but as you discover more of its abilities you’ll start wondering how you ever managed without it. Quicksilver can also be told to keep track of the web pages in your Bookmarks menu, so you can open a page just by typing a few characters of its name. Once you’ve found the file you’re interested in by typing a few letters of its name, hitting the Tab key moves you to the “actions” field, from where you can choose to perform one of a large number of different operations on it – for example, email it to someone else, compress it, copy or move it to a different folder, and so on. But, in fact, the program does much more than that. If launching were all Quicksilver did it would still have a lot of friends, since that feature alone saves a significant amount of time compared to navigating through document folders, or even through your Applications folder if you’re trying to launch an app that doesn’t have a shortcut in the Dock. Since it became open source, though, there’s been renewed interest, and we’re hoping a lively developer community will spring up around it. Quicksilver has been around for quite some time, but it’s been widely felt to have stagnated somewhat while its developer, Nicholas Jitkoff, worked on other things. Hit the key combination to bring up its window (the default is, but it’s completely user-configurable), type a few letters of the name of the application or document you want to open, hit Return and you’re there. At its most basic, Quicksilver (how lovely and old-fashioned to see a product without an unnecessary capital letter in the middle of its name) is an application launcher. The biggest news on the Mac open-source front for many people will be the fact that Quicksilver has now become an open-source project.
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