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Mojave compatibility

Is it your intention to make Quicksilver work with Mojave? I just downloaded it and attempted to install and it crashed 3 times - never opened.

Check this thread:

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/blacktree-quicksilver/mN8Pz1-JXMc

Also:

https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver/issues/2466

Sprint Wrap-Up

Our first official sprint has come to an end. Or at least, according to the calendar. We’re still actively working!

Some Stats

New features, bug fixes, and other changes submitted: 17

New features, bug fixes, and other changes already incorporated into the app: 9

Number of GitHub issues closed: 8

Oldest GitHub issue closed: 1453 days old! (this issue was opened back when Quicksilver ß69 was still at large, remember the beta days?!)

Lines of code added: 2416

Lines of code removed: 6803

Blog posts posted: 3 (Wait, are we counting that?)

Highlights

Here are some highlights from the accepted and pending changes:

Clean up some confusing wording in the preferences

Correctly reset the third pane in between commands

More reliably determine when the third pane should appear

No longer show duplicates in the third pane (and other places)

Better results in the third pane for AppleScript actions

More reliable and consistent behavior from the left arrow key

The ability to sort results by date

Improved reliability when automatically showing/hiding the Task Viewer

Commands scheduled to run later can be viewed (and cancelled) from the Task Viewer

Completed tasks remain in the Task Viewer long enough to be seen

Fixed 3 things that could freeze Quicksilver

All automated tests are passing

Tons of internal clean-up that should make maintaining the code easier

Made the ⌫ work the same as in most other search fields (deletes one letter at a time). The option to delete all letters at once is still available.

Get things ready for macOS Sierra

If you have Quicksilver configured to get “Developer Previews”, you can preview some of these changes in the next few days. (Note that Developer Previews can contain known bugs, and features could be removed prior to a final release if they aren't quite ready.)

Summary

Though only one of us actually took time away from their day job, everyone put in a lot of time to make these improvements possible. I’d call it a success. Thanks to everyone who supported the sprint, either with their time or through donations.

Looking forward to the next sprint!

What are Event Triggers?

On the list of things you should be using but probably aren't, you'll find Quicksilver's Event Triggers.

Most Quicksilver users are familiar with Keyboard Triggers. You find yourself doing something frequently and think "It sure would be nice if I could make this happen with just one keystroke". So you think of an unused keyboard shortcut (which is the hardest part), go into Quicksilver's preferences, create a new trigger, and life gets easier.

What if you could do it in 0 keystrokes?

That's where Event Triggers come in. Like all triggers in Quicksilver, Event Triggers can run any command Quicksilver is capable of running, but instead of running in response to keystrokes from the user, they run automatically in response to things happening on your computer.

The list of events you can assign triggers to will depend on which Quicksilver plugins are installed, but there are quite a few simply built into the Event Triggers Plugin. As of this writing, there are 38 events you can potentially hook into.

Some examples will probably explain it better at this point. The plugin's documentation lists the following:

When the screen saver activates, pause iTunes.

When the computer wakes from sleep, open Mail.

When the network changes, run a shell script.

When a disk named "Backup" is mounted, compress a specific folder and copy it to the disk.

When switching to the internal speakers (headphones disconnected), pause iTunes.

Here are some other ideas:

Turn off AirPlay (by switching to the "Computer" device) when headphones are plugged in

Switch to the appropriate equalizer preset in iTunes when an optical cable is plugged in

When Pages launches, quit Twitter

After compressing files or folders, move the archive to the desktop

When taking a screen shot, ask me who to e-mail it to

Append a message to a file when you lose Internet connectivity

To get started, install the Event Triggers plug-in from Quicksilver's Preferences, then go to the Triggers section of the preferences. When adding a new trigger, choose "Event". You'll be able to configure the trigger using its Info panel.

An explanation of the settings and other helpful tips can be found in the help for the Event Triggers plugin. (Select it in the preferences and hit ?) Let us know what you come up with!

#quicksilver #triggers

Announcing the very first Quicksilver Sprint

Introducing the very first Quicksilver Sprint!

This blog post is making an appearance after a fairly long hiatus from blog posts for us, but that’s not to say we’re not still developing Quicksilver and making it better than ever.

Over the past year or so, development on Quicksilver has been progressing at an albeit slower pace than before, so, in order to boost our productivity, the QS core team has decided to hold our very first coding sprint.

What this very first Quicksilver sprint will mean is that one of our core QS developers (Rob) will be the last week of July off from his regular work to devote to Quicksilver. This is really exciting: with a whole weeks of a core developer’s time there’s a lot we can achieve!

This time around, we’ll be funding the Quicksilver Sprint with past donations from our users. So a big thanks to everyone who has supported the Quicksilver community with donations in the past is in order, you’ve made this very first sprint possible!

Current members of the Quicksilver development team

Future Sprints

In the future we hope to hold more sprints, perhaps with more than just one developer working at a time. If you’re a dedicated Quicksilver user and appreciate the work our core developers put into the project, then this is a really great opportunity to see a real result from your donation. Around a $50 donation would cover one hour of a developer’s time, meaning even something as small as $10 could result in 12 minutes of development time - perhaps enough to fix a bug or two?![1]

Donate

If you’d like to donate, you can do so on our donate page

Now, it’s time to get coding!

What’s a core developer?!

These are the guys who’ve dedicated hundreds if not thousands of hours of their time to help improve and develop Quicksilver, and deal with the daily maintenance of the Quicksilver app and its systems. Want to know who our core developers are? You can see the main faces behind Quicksilver here: https://github.com/orgs/quicksilver/teams/core-developers

A note to any programmers out there

If you’re keen to help the Quicksilver project out, then come join our team. Send us a message on the Google Groups, or join us on Slack

footnotes

[1] A bug I (pjrobertson) just fixed with AppleScripts a few days ago took me about 20 minutes to fix. It also lead to me finding another bug, which I fixed in about 10 minutes. (Hard)Core developers get things done quick. BAM!

QS will remain the top dog

Submitted by Anonymous:

Guys just a word of encouragement, no matter how pretty spotlight may look on the upcoming release, QS is based on better, broader design and, premises. Just the fact that plugins as useful as User Interface exist, empowering users to access application menu items via the keyboard make sure that mainstream Spotlight will never reach the top.

I remain an avid user and supporter. Please keep the great work. QS is at the core of a lot of people’s efficiency.

Thanks, Anon! – LoveQuicksilver

Redo the iTunes Shuffle

Manage Shuffle in iTunes without point and click

A year ago, I wrote about iTunes breaking AppleScript's ability to directly toggle Shuffle, and provided a script as a workaround. In iTunes 12, the Shuffle menu items have been… shuffled again, with no practical way to determine their status.

This is irksome, but not insurmountable. Download the Shuffle.scpt action, put the script in…

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/

…and relaunch QS. Make sure Quicksilver is present and checked in Security & Privacy>Accessibility to allow the script to access iTunes' menu items.

The Shuffle menu in iTunes has the options:

Off

Songs

Albums

Groupings

Type any of these words or their initials (f for off) into pane 1, and execute 'Shuffle' in pane 2. Other text will be converted to 'On'. The action will generate a notification of the command. Because the action is blind, it's best executed while iTunes is already running.

@LoveQuicksilver

Here's the full AppleScript for the curious:

using terms from application "Quicksilver" on get direct types return {"NSStringPboardType"} end get direct types on process text _text set _textSubstitutionList to {{"o", "On"}, {"f", "Off"}, {"s", "Songs"}, {"a", "Albums"},¬ {"album", "Albums"}, {"g", "Groupings"}, {"grouping", "Groupings"}} repeat with _textSubstitution in _textSubstitutionList if _text = item 1 of _textSubstitution then set _text to item 2 of _textSubstitution exit repeat end if end repeat if _text is not in {"Off", "Songs", "Albums", "Groupings"} then set _text to "On" try tell application "System Events" tell process "iTunes" to click menu item _text of menu 1 of¬ menu item "Shuffle" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Controls" of menu bar 1 end tell --tell application "Quicksilver" to set selection to ("iTunes Shuffle: " & _text) display notification _text with title "iTunes Shuffle" on error a number b display notification a with title "iTunes Shuffle" --tell application "Quicksilver" to set selection to a end try end process text end using terms from

Screenshots to Photos

Quickly add screenshots to Photos app with Quicksilver

If you're going all-in with the new Photos app for Yosemite, wouldn't it be great to put screenshots there, just like its iOS counterpart, and have the originals moved to Trash? It's straightforward enough to create a Folder Action in Automator to handle this process – details at my sister (brother?) site at iOSXalt.com.

However, Folder Actions work on any images added to a target folder, and not just screenshots. Quicksilver's Screen Capture Plugin returns screenshots directly to pane 1, so I've made an action that can import screenshots to Photos app and then delete them. Or not – unlike a Folder Action.

Download the action here, put the .scpt file in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions and relaunch Quicksilver. Take a screenshot, tab to pane 2 and find the action (I've set it to appear when pressing h, so I can run the command from pane 1 using ⌘⇧H).

Added bonus: the script adds a screenshot keyword to the imported image, making it easy to track screenshots in Photos with a smart album.

@LoveQuicksilver

Here's the full AppleScript code:

using terms from application "Quicksilver" on open _screenshot try if (count of _screenshot) ≠ 1 then tell application "Quicksilver" to set selection to _screenshot return end if set _nameExtension to false set _mediaItems to {} set _screenshot to item 1 of _screenshot tell application "System Events" to set _frontMostApp to (name ¬ of processes whose frontmost is true) tell application "System Events" to set _nameExtension to ¬ name extension of _screenshot if _nameExtension = "png" then tell application "Photos" set _importAlbum to last import album set _mediaItemsOld to media items of _importAlbum open _screenshot repeat while _mediaItemsOld = _mediaItems or _mediaItems = {} set _mediaItems to media items of _importAlbum delay 0.1 end repeat tell _importAlbum to set keywords of item 1 of _mediaItems to "screenshot" end tell tell application "Finder" to move _screenshot to trash tell application (item 1 of _frontMostApp) to activate tell application "Quicksilver" to set selection to "" end if on error a number b tell application "Quicksilver" to display dialog a end try end open end using terms from

Twitter Scripter Action

Tweet from pane 1 – no authentication required

Twitter Scripter is an agent which allows access to the Twitter API directly from AppleScript. It's available for free in the Mac App Store.

Here's an action that allows you to use the agent to tweet directly from Quicksilver:

Twitter Scripter.zip

When run, the action will display a result message in large type, and place the tweet text back in Quicksilver's pane 1. Tweets longer than 140 characters will generate a character count.

Some editing needed

Unzip the download, put the script in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/ and relaunch Quicksilver. Open the script in Script Editor.app and change the _name value from 'LoveQuicksilver' to your preferred Twitter account. Unfortunately, the action will become the default for text, so tab to pane 2, scroll down, click the grey dot next to your favourite action, and click 'Make Default'.

The agent connects to Twitter accounts set up in the Internet Accounts panel of System Preferences, so no authentication is necessary. If you're concerned about privacy, do some research before installing it. I'm happy enough that the agent is in the Mac App Store. It also enables methods to search Twitter and send images. Check out its Examples page for more info.

By modifying the script, it's possible to tweet from different accounts using pane 3 – re-activate all the commented-out parts of the script in Script Editor. Remove the display dialog line if you're not concerned about sending accidental tweets (like I did).

@LoveQuicksilver

Default Actions

Keep the actions you want up top

Actions in Quicksilver come from different sources, including plugins, Services, custom actions and Quicksilver itself. New actions have a tendency to insert themselves just above the default action for a particular object type. Great for discoverability, detrimental to muscle memory and the ability to 'act without doing'.

Get back to working without effort.

Make an action the default

Find an object type in pane 1. Object types are not limited to text, URLs, files & folders, apps and email addresses. The default action in pane 2 will often be different for each object type.

Tab to pane 2 and, without typing, scroll down the list until the desired action is selected. Click the small grey dot next to its list entry and click 'Make Default'.

Use in-app shortcuts

'Paste as Plain Text' might be the default action for text objects, and 'E-mail Item…' for email addresses, but what about pasting an email address? Grab some text in pane 1, tab to pane 2 and hit 'p'. Find 'Paste as Plain Text' in the list and click the grey dot once more. Click 'Set as Default for "P"'. Whenever an object is selected in pane 1, hitting ⌘⇧P will paste it plainly, no matter what its default action is.

Reorder actions in Preferences

The Actions panel is a scary looking beast, and is tackled in (the still somewhat scary) Action Actions blog post. For this post though, a quick setup guide.

Open Preferences and click Actions in the sidebar. By default, 'All Actions' is selected and the search field is focused. Type, or partly type, the name of favourite actions and make a note of their 'Rank' numbers. Clear the search field, find the actions, and drag them to the top of the list.

In Quicksilver, certain actions only appear for certain objects. It's better to have 'Open' ranked above 'Paste as Plain Text', as it will never appear for text objects. 'Paste as Plain Text' will appear for almost everything, and is usually undesirable as the default action for apps.

The more specialised the action, the less chance it has of interfering with the default actions for common objects. Here's a simple ranking of **common actions*** that will keep them as the default for their (object types) or particular kind of object:

Play (iTunes Music)

Run (Files & Folders) – AppleScripts

Show Contact (Contacts)

E-mail Item… (Send Directly) (Email Addresses)

Search For… (Search URLs)

Open URL (URLs)

Open (Files & Folders)

Paste as Plain Text (Any Type) – text

This setup…

…creates these default actions

Experiment a little

Try dragging actions from installed plugins to the top of the ranking list. Changes will take effect immediately in Quicksilver's interface, and are easy to reverse. File Compression, Displays, User Interface, and Keychain actions are among the many that are unlikely to affect common objects' default actions.

*The 'Play', 'Show Contact', 'E-mail Item…', and 'Search For…' actions require the iTunes, Contacts, E-mail Support and Web Search plugins respectively.

@LoveQuicksilver

Quicksilver 1.2.0 (400E)

All the latest changes

The official 1.2.0 release should be here soon. But if you can't wait:

The results list will wrap when scrolling (#1928)

Love this. Anything at the end of a list can be quickly reached by hitting ↑ in pane 1 – even if the list isn't visible. The shortcuts fn→ and fn← will still go to the end and start of a list respectively, no matter where in a list the focus is.

Revert some changes to the results list (#1930)

In Yosemite, results now appear in the list.

AppleScripts that specify direct and indirect types now accept UTIs (#1916, #1917)

This looks really powerful. More info here and here.

Open URL is no longer the default for files that are dragged or pasted into the interface (#1824)

Fix a crash when determining default web browser (#1922)

Allow right-arrowing into /var, /tmp, and /etc (#1922)

Better handling of arrays returned from AppleScript (#1825, #1826)

Fixed missing preference icons under Yosemite (#1932, #1933)

Internal Improvements (#1583, #1584, #1585, #1586, #1665, #1625, #1648, #1638, #1695, #1714, #1763, #1765, #1740, #1771, #1775, #1794, #1828, #1839, #1770, #1784, #1922)

Includes the latest translations from Transifex project (#1900)

Removed PkgInfo files to allow code signing under Xcode 6 (#1931)

Rebuild and signed Automator actions using Xcode 6

@LoveQuicksilver

Launch Center Pro and Quicksilver: Update

Not a Quicksilver iOS app

Perhaps due to changes in LCP 2.3(.1?), the original URL in Launch Center Pro and Quicksilver, which appends an HTML tag to a file, no longer works.

I've updated the post to reflect the latest changes. Basically:

launch://dropbox/append?text=<a href=\"[[clipboard]]\">[prompt:Bookmark name?]</a><br>&path=%2FDocuments&name=Favourite%20bookmarks.html

has been changed to:

launch://dropbox/append?text={{<a href=\"[[clipboard]]\">[[prompt:Bookmark name?]]</a><br>}}&path={{/Documents}}&name={{Favourite bookmarks.html}}

(Curly brackets enclose the text objects, thus URL escaping has been removed.)

@LoveQuicksilver

Quicksilver 1.2.0 (400C)

A new prerelease is out, with the following changes:

Remember to change 'Application Update Type' to 'Prerelease Candidates' in Preferences>Extras.

Feedback welcome.

@LoveQuicksilver

Launch Center Pro and Quicksilver

Add URLs to a custom Quicksilver bookmark list – all from iOS

Not a Quicksilver iOS app

With more and more Apple-centric computing taking place on iOS devices, it can be frustrating to be deprived of the workflow wizardry of Mac apps such as Quicksilver. URL schemes, however, can bring some Quicksilver-like magic to your touchscreen – with the excellent Launch Center Pro waving the wand, and Dropbox as its lovely assistant.

To illustrate the power of URL schemes, this post will show how to use Launch Center Pro (LCP) to add a link to a file, like a Quicksilver boss.

Quicksilver has the ability to parse an HTML file's links into their URL and title components. A great way to utilise this feature is to create a bookmark file that can be browsed in Quicksilver, a browser, or a text editor. A script to append a URL in Quicksilver to a bookmark file is here.

Important: make sure the containing folder of the script's bookmark file path exists in Dropbox (In this script, '~/Dropbox/Documents/'). Save the script in:

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/

Relaunch Quicksilver. Bring a URL into pane 1, ‘Bookmark to favourites’ in pane 2, and a title in pane 3 (press '.' to activate text mode).

Hit enter, and an HTML link will be appended to the end of:

~/Dropbox/Documents/Favourite bookmarks.html

Add the above file to Quicksilver's Custom Catalog:

A relaunch might be needed for the links to be cataloged

Any bookmark within the file will be added to Quicksilver's global catalog. A convenient way to bookmark a URL is to use the 'Current Web Page' objects from the Chrome and Safari plugins.

No need to have the browser frontmost

Now to recreate the bookmark workflow in LCP. There's an monumental guide to LCP on the MacStories site. Once the app's surface has been scratched, create a new action and paste the following (one line) URL into the URL field:

launch://dropbox/append?text={{<a href=\"[[clipboard]]\">[[prompt:Bookmark name?]]</a><br>}}&path={{/Documents}}&name={{Favourite bookmarks.html}}

Important: make sure the LCP action's bookmark file path is the same as the one in the script's.

On any site in any app, simply copy its URL to the clipboard, fire up the new action, type in a name and tap 'Launch'. The URL and its title will be browsable within Quicksilver in a matter of moments (internet permitting).

From left to right, top to bottom

Trigger 'Favourite bookmarks.html⇥Show Contents' to quickly browse saved bookmarks only

This is just one way to use URL schemes to compliment the power of Quicksilver. Mobile computing is going to be massive, but 'traditional' computing is going to be with us for a long while yet. I predict exciting times for cross-platform cooperation.

@LoveQuicksilver

Hello New Followers

Question:

Does the following picture look familiar?

If the answer is in {"Yes", "I don't care"}, welcome.

If not, welcome.

@LoveQuicksilver

Quick Airmail

Send an email message or attachment through Quicksilver

On Twitter, Jeff Lambert asked:

Airmail includes AppleScript support, so here's an Airmail version of the QuickSparrow action from a while back.

A usage guide:

Press '.' in pane 3 to type text

Alternatively, navigate to, or paste, a file in pane 3 for an attachment

Save the script in:

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/

Important: Open the script in AppleScript Editor.app, and type your preferred email sender address between the quotes after the _sender variable. Relaunch Quicksilver and mail away.

@LoveQuicksilver

Code Snippets on Quicksilver's Shelf

Quickly automate repetitive tasks without saving files or triggers

For some reason, the action's info sticks on text's default action

Repetitive tasks are the bane of many a computer user's working day. It's often worth writing scripts to handle this drudgery, but sometimes the productivity gain seems to be outweighed by the cost of firing up an editor, finding a suitable place for a script file, and making a trigger or abbreviation for it. Make the option of scripting more attractive by using Quicksilver's 'Run as AppleScript' action.

Apple's iWork suite of apps received substantial updates on April 1st. A welcome (re)addition to Numbers is the ability to set page margins in the print dialog. Unfortunately for me, that means manually typing the correct margins into many existing documents.

Not fun after the 10th time

I typed the following code into Quicksilver:

delay .5 tell application "System Events" to keystroke ¬ "1.2 .9 .27 .37 .21 .71"

(There are two tabs between each value.) I placed it on the Shelf to be added to the global catalog, and I made sure 'Run as AppleScript' is the default action when hitting 'r' in the second pane.

In Numbers, I select the text in the first page margins field, and in Quicksilver type 'del' followed by ⇧R to populate them all. Job done! Trigger 'Last Command⇥Run' in the next instance (and before executing any other QS commands) to make the process even quicker! Auto-inception achieved.

@LoveQuicksilver

Quicksilver on Your iPhone is Fake

It's an April Fool's Day joke

The icon is a link in the iPhome code that iOS interprets as an app icon

An 'app launcher' with the power of Quicksilver is not possible on iOS. But with Apple's mobile hardware becoming ever more powerful, and the increasing desire to use tablets in the workplace, perhaps a future iOS with more of the features and accessibility of OS X is not impossible. For now, we can only dream…

@LoveQuicksilver

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