Quicksilver Todo List Loveliness

I love Quicksilver, to the extent that I can’t actually do anything with a computer that doesn’t have it installed, and will just sit there hitting Control+Space over and over again forever, until someone kind leads me off to the quiet corner for a reassuring sip of lemon squash.

Quicksilver’s greatest strength—the fact it can do absolutely bloody everything under the sun, dead fast—is also a weakness, since it’s often too easy to plod along doing something with the Finder and sundry applications, with all the attendant clicking and opening and general time-wasting that involves, because it doesn’t occur to you to tinker with QS to see if there’s a better way.

Thankfully, the Getting Things Done user community spend every hour of their strange meta-existences tinkering with elaborate efficiency systems rather than doing things, thereby turning up Quicksilver gems like the following, which I just spotted in a recent-ish entry at 43 Folders:

Let’s say you have a filed called “TODO.txt” that you add to throughout the day. In QS’s preferences, go to “Preferences > Triggers” and click “+” to make a new trigger. In the interface, type until you find your TODO.txt doc (important: it must end with “.txt”), then TAB to the second pane and type “Append To”. DO NOT TAB to the third pane; just hit Save. Now assign the new trigger a key command over on the right, and you’ve got “one-click” access to add items to your TODO list.

I’m aware that’ll be somewhere between gobbledegook and poppycock to anyone reading who doesn’t use Quicksilver: it means that instead of navigating to your text file in the Finder, then opening it in a text editor, then scrolling to the bottom of the file, then adding what you want to type, then saving the file, then closing it, Quicksilver lets you do the same job by banging on three keys simultaneously, typing your snippet of text and hitting return.

Have you any idea how many sweet, sweet milliseconds that could save over the course of a lifetime? Me neither, but it’s probably between ‘several’ and ‘quite a few’. Brilliant.

Posted at 5pm on 15/08/05 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
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Tags: applications, mac, quicksilver, text