Creative use of tags

A discussion about organizing files on the Mac must include Hazel. I use it to rename, move and tag (works with both Openmeta and Mavericks tags) my files, and more. It can even find the payment day in an invoice and name the pdf with that date, for example.

And Quicksilver for the manual stuff...

@benfdc I just saw that you edited your prior post to link to an article about sparsebundle corruption on Dropbox. I therefore have to comment on this so that people don't get the wrong impression: There is no sparsebundle/disk image corruption issue with Dropbox. That guy was doing it wrong, by trying to mount a disk image on two computers at once. That obviously won't work - for the same reason that OS X itself doesn't allow you to mount disk images on more than one computer simultaneously: Each machine would have its own "idea" of what is on the hard disk and the various writes would conflict and the state would be totally messed up. Of course there's going to be chaos and inconsistencies. It had nothing to do with Dropbox.

@Xe997 A discussion about organizing files on the Mac must include Hazel.

Holy balls, that's the kind of app I've been looking for! I could see so many uses. The first thing I am going to do is set it to watch my "incoming files" folder and automatically sorting everything in it into a neat hierarchy based on filetypes and dates and stuff like that. This is a definite buy from me. Thanks!

Quicksilver is nice too. It's the best keyboard-based launcher I've used. But I actually haven't used it since like 2008. Nowadays I exclusively use Spotlight to launch documents and apps. What are you using Quicksilver for that Spotlight can't do? I remember it having lots of plugins for neat things.

@benfdc Workflowy

Hmm... That's a very dangerous tool. At first glance, I saw the demo video and thought "cool! it's like an endlessly nested wiki." But there are some huge issues with using it for to-dos, etc: You end up endlessly nesting and dumping info until it's just a huge pile of unsorted nothingness, which in turn means no overview/knowing where to start, which in turn leads to procrastination.

It's better to use OmniFocus to break down jobs into their components and assigning contexts + locations to every task so that they actually get done. Contexts are things like "Online," or "Home" or "Garage" or "Office." The idea is that you tag every task properly. Then, instead of looking at a huge pile of to-dos (a la Workflowy), you just switch the Context view to "Home" (if you are at home) and start crossing off things you can do while you're at home. It keeps track of your progress in everything and supports both parallel and serial tasks, deadlines, flagging important tasks, reminding you to review your to-do lists to ensure it's still accurate, etc. It even supports location-tagging and has mobile clients, so that your cellphone can beep at you when you're near the grocery story and say "Buy turkey for thanksgiving!" It's awesome.

That being said, Workflowy could be super useful for sketching out ideas rapidly in a much more structured manner than a text document. It's sort of like a text-only mindmap.

If I were to use such a thing, I would use Tree instead, which I've been checking out lately. It's like Workflowy (a text tree) but totally offline and private. Maybe worth you checking it out if you want an offline version of Workflowy?

The main reason I haven't bought Tree yet is that I avoid all software that makes you dump everything into one place. It leads to a mountain of data that becomes really hard to sift through. We have to remember that the most blissful state is to not have any data that needs sorting, not to build a great container for stuffing it all into and putting a lid on it.

@benfdc Evernote

That's a fantastic tool. Used to love it until DEVONthink. There's a lot of overlap between the two. What settled it for me is that Dt is offline (private) and has a fantastic Artificial Intelligence-engine that auto-guesses where incoming data should be sorted and suggests possible folders. Makes it super easy to jot down notes or clip URLs or import files, which all get dumped into its Inbox, and then you auto-sort them into appropriate folders later.

Both tools are great, but Dt is a lot more powerful. I've been using it for years and probably only use 10% of its features. It's absolutely jam-packed.

@benfdc MoneyWell

Oooh, that is the best finance tracker I've ever seen! Beautiful and really advanced. Nice find! <3 :)

@Xe997 Wow, this reminded me of why I had to quit Quicksilver. It was right around 2009 when development stopped and the project seemed dead. It's great to hear that it has been revived.

Better yet, you reminded me of why I need Quicksilver! I manually do all of the things you describe. I could save a lot of time, sanity and friction by using Quicksilver instead! It had been so long that I had forgotten how powerful Quicksilver is, and how limited I am with Spotlight's only ability to open documents.

Thanks a lot, I'll save the description and use every plugin you recommend. I'm installing Quicksilver right now.

I'm all about power-user apps and having as few (and as great) apps as possible, and this is absolutely worthy of daily use.

You mentioned the "UI Access" plugin for getting access to menu-items inside of Quicksilver. I'll do you one better in that regard:

KeyCue - the developer is known for being a jerkface and the price is high, but it's so good and perfectly does what it's designed to do. There's nothing that comes close to it in this regard (the free "CheatSheet" blows).

I hold down the Cmd-key for about 3/4 of a second (don't press any other keys or move the mouse) and it gives me a beautiful overview of all available key shortcuts - and it's searchable! They light up based on what modifier-keys I hold down or what search strings I type in. You'll master the shortcuts and advanced features of all your software with this. Not only will you find what you were looking for, but you'll discover things you had no idea existed.

If you look up KeyCue videos on YouTube, be aware that they're all at least half a year old and are for the OLD version. The new Version 7 introduced the free-type searching.

I'd say install the trial and begin referring to it regularly to learn your software. You'll wonder how you could ever stand using computers without it. All of those "hidden" app features are suddenly presented to you in a way that will allow you to learn the keyboard shortcuts rapidly. It's awesome.

One setting I recommend changing is setting the "system-wide shortcuts" key to a different modifier than Cmd, so that Cmd is devoted to just showing the active application's shortcuts. Otherwise you'll have the menu populated with lots of useless extras describing how to take screenshots in OS X, enabling dictation, etc. ;) In fact I set my system-wide one to Cmd-Opt-Ctrl-Shift since I barely ever need to check those out. Anyway, enjoy!...

@benfdc Ahh, sharing to-dos and grocery lists is a neat use of Workflowy! I've sometimes thought about apps for sharing grocery lists. But usually I do the shopping.

As for GrandView, I can see how OmniFocus reminded you of it. There are several similarities in prioritizing tasks and so on. However, OmniFocus was written using the latest interpretation of David Allen's Getting Things Done protocol and how it can relate to computers, with input from productivity gurus like Merlin Mann and David Allen himself. It's the pinnacle of GTD apps. I say that having tried the competition. :-) OmniFocus is very clean and efficient. However, to anyone reading I'd say it's worth holding out on a purchase, though, because OmniFocus 2 is in beta testing at the moment, so you can save money and avoid paying twice if you're not in a hurry.

You can get all of your "lists of lists" with OmniFocus, because it allows endlessly nesting and grouping projects and tasks as deeply as you want. You can go for a deep workflowy-like hierarchy if you want to. Give it a spin.

@Xe997 KeyCue seems like a nice app, but I'm not sold on how the search works.

You're using the latest stable version, I guess? Enable beta-access. There's a shortcut that was added recently, Cmd+Shift+F if I remember right.

UI Access invokes a complete list of the current application's menu items (that's 860 in Word).

Oh dear. That's a lot. KeyCue shows only the things you can actually do at this exact moment, not any of the inactive shortcuts, and this means you get a concise overview of available actions and will discover things you didn't even know existed. It's amazing to open an advanced piece of software and holding down one key to get a sheet of available actions that simplify your life.

For example, typing "hi" in Safari makes "Clear history" the top result.

That's what the search function is for in KeyCue. So if you know that you want to clear history, you type hi and it will highlight all shortcuts with "hi" in the name.

There are two ways to find shortcuts. Holding down modifier keys (cmd, shift, ctrl, option) will highlight all shortcuts with any combination of those. Activating the search field lets you search by shortcut name instead.

There are also two ways to activate shortcuts. Either clicking with the mouse. Or pressing the keyboard shortcut that it is trying to teach you (so that you don't have to use the KeyCue interface at all next time). If your search was currently active, I believe Escape clears it and lets you activate the shortcut via the keyboard method.

Anyway, switch to enabling Beta updates in the Preferences to get keyboard-search. :)

I'm wondering what you power user types think of Rixstep's stuff—CLIX, the Xfile suite, ACP Web Services, and the rest of the AppleCore Project. I have dabbled with CLIX and AWS from time to time, but most of the rest is over my head.

Cathode looks awesome. I could pretend I was back writing Forth programs on my Atari 800XL.

@semblance

Good points. I try to keep only the applications that I really need. If you need an application like Bartender to manage the menu bar icons, then you probably have gone too far, for instance.

Spot on about the maintenance. An example: I have used Openmeta tags, so right now I'm not ready to migrate to Mavericks until I'm sure there is a stable tool that converts those tags into Mavericks tags. And I'm still waiting for Quicksilver to support Mavericks tags, and while Dropbox works fine with Openmeta, it is seeing some issues with Mavericks tags.

One solution is of course to skip the odd numbered OS X releases, in fact I did go to 10.8 from 10.6. But then I will miss the Mavericks-only feature of displaying album art in the iTunes notifications. So that's not the best solution.

• Needing the best way to store digital documents, scanned PDFs, etc: DEVONthink Pro Office is the world-leader. There's nothing out there that's as powerful (Evernote is like a lite-version of Dt). I am constantly grateful that I evaluated all of the competition and made this choice early on, as it has everything I need and 10x more. Everything I scan becomes OCR'd to be digitally searchable and indexed by Spotlight, and its incredible AI engine automatically suggests the proper tags and folders based on similarity to other documents. In fact, folders are tags in Dt and things can exist in more than one "folder", which is incredible. I also really enjoy its ability to merge and split PDFs on your chosen page boundaries, which lets me collate related things into a single PDF.

• Needing the best way to manage my projects and to-dos: I'm sorry but Things is useless compared to OmniFocus. If you like the zen-like interface, that'll be coming to OmniFocus 2 which is in the final stages of open beta and will be out soon. Anyway, with a simple global hotkey, I can bring up an interface where I can easily dump all thoughts, using the tab-key to fill in the Context, Start-date and Due-date (or I can wait with that categorization until later) and it'll be dumped into an Inbox. Once everything is out of your mind and into your inbox, it's trivial to assign them to appropriate projects. Next, you simply go on with your daily life, and have OmniFocus remind you of what needs to be done. The iOS location-based reminders are the best of them all. If you're driving near a hardware store it'll literally beep at you and say "Hey, you need to buy a flamethrower to burn all of those legal papers people insist on sending you. You're near a hardware store. Let's do it!" Then, when I'm at the computer, I go into "Context" mode and switch it to "Home", which shows me all tasks doable from Home, Online, Email, etc. I then just start working on sub-tasks of larger projects, without needing to worry about the larger picture. It optimizes what you get out of your time in life, by making you do several unrelated tasks at once, rather than suboptimally "staying fixed on one project". Here's an example: If you've got a project for building a chair, and you do it all sequentially, you might do this: Order some stuff online (at computer), then drive to the hardware store to buy some other parts, and voila - there's a huge part of your day gone. Instead, OmniFocus keeps you in one "Context", such as Email. If you'd have stayed home and focused on doing email-related tasks, you might have finished thirty tasks related to Email/Online work in that day, rather than just a single order online and one long drive that just wasted a lot of your time. Think of OmniFocus like "grouping" your sub-tasks together, so that your overall tasks get done MUCH faster. This is why you're making a mistake when saying "it's a waste of time categorizing things." On the contrary, that's the way to efficiency; collating seemingly unrelated tasks into one big productivity-orgy. ;) One more important aspect is that if a task is easy, I do it right then and there on the spot; it has to be done sometime, so you might as well get it over with rather than wasting more time (in management) by lazily deferring it for later.

• Needing the best way of storing passwords and software licenses: You all know this one. There's nothing out there that's as well-designed and as powerful as 1Password. It takes care of >100 software licenses (90 of which are related to my profession, mostly plugins for audio/video editing suities, and the rest being general software), and ~100 websites (again, almost all of which are related to my profession). With 1Password I have secure storage that's available everywhere. I couldn't dream of anything more. It's brilliant.

• Needing the best way to rapidly schedule appointments in iCal (for things that aren't major enough to be managed by OmniFocus): This is where Fantastical kicks in. I have it on both my Macs and my phone, and it lets me hit Opt+C to bring up an interface where I can type "Lunch with the President on monday next week at noon at Eleven Madison Park." and it'll schedule exactly that. Now you might be thinking "No way! It couldn't understand all of that!" and that's where you'd be wrong. ;) Not only does it do all of that, but it also shows me all of my upcoming events with that same Opt+C keypress. And since OmniFocus syncs with iCal, I see all deadlines in there as well! I don't want to live a life without Fantastical.

• Needing the best way to become even more effective as an editor, by actually learning the keyboard shortcuts: For anyone that's been paying attention in the thread, you'll know that the answer is KeyCue. Holding down Cmd brings up a cheat sheet that shows you all menu actions that you can perform, along with their associated keyboard shortcuts. I might look at a shortcut a few times, after which I'll have memorized it and be that much more effective at my tasks. It works for all applications.

• Needing the best way to save time while typing the same thing over and over again: The answer is Smile's TextExpander. To type out my full name, I'll just type "nname", and to type out my full address, "aadd", and my full email, "eemail", or my social security number, "sssn", etc. You can choose any shortcut, but it's recommended that you simply repeat the first letter, that way you won't forget what you called the shortcut since they all have logical names. Why waste time and energy repeating stuff, when you can just type a few letters and have it done for you? That's what I call frictionless.

• Honorary mentions: I am extremely strict about adding things to this setup. Quicksilver and Hazel were mentioned in the thread, and are currently installed on my MacBook Pro where I don't mind installing trial software. Hazel has already fallen away. It's neat that it can auto-sort files for you, but I looked around at how people are using it and most people seem to be saying "so, uh, this is SO cool..." but not actually showing any great uses for it. Most people seem to use it to sort their downloads-folder to remove junk from it, sort things into neat subfolders, auto-import downloaded music into iTunes, etc. I saw zero need for any of that, since I barely ever surf the web (I'm too busy doing awesome® things instead). But Quicksilver is very close to breaking through to being a must-have that'll soon be installed on the Mac Pro as well. It replaces Spotlight entirely, and its search interface is way more intuitive in that you can type "sysinf" to find "SYStem INFormation" - which is something that Spotlight would never understand. It also adds incredible features via a myriad of plugins. You can launch websites, open terminal windows, get info on folders, search through menu bar actions, etc. It's chock-full of features, and it looks VERY beautiful with the "Nostromo" theme that I mentioned. Another honorary mention is BetterTouchTool if you have a Magic Trackpad. I've set up some neat multitouch actions that let me switch back/forwards between apps and tabs, close apps/tabs, etc.

At the end of the day, it's all about achieving a frictionless life where your tools are capable of either doing the work for you or at least greatly assisting you to the point where you don't need to waste any energy thinking about it. You know and trust that the data that matters is in there and being taken care of and that you're free to relax.

Most of all, it's about never taking on junk in the first place. As I've said before:

We have to remember that the most blissful state is to not have any data that needs sorting, not to build a great container for stuffing it all into and putting a lid on it.

@Xe997 I was focused on the filing-aspect of Hazel while evaluating it. It's indeed neat that it can do things like: "For documents with a download source of SomeWebsite, look through the contents and extract a date following mm/dd/yy format, rename it to yyyy-mm-dd SomeWebsite.pdf, and move it into DEVONthink's Inbox folder." I was very focused on that aspect of Hazel, but at the end of the day I had concluded that I don't need that feature. Almost everything I file is OCR'd from papers which ends up directly in DEVONthink by the scanning process, so it has no chance to pass through Hazel. But most of all - it's trivial to type "2013-10-25 SomeAgency" into the "Title?" window that pops up immediately after the scanning process. As for Hazel's ability to "take out the trash," I always clear the trash after anything I delete. Time Machine is there for restoring files. That only leaves one other use for Hazel - automatically sorting your "Downloads" folder, but I don't waste time surfing the web so that was no use to me either.

Speaking of which - this is the only forum on the entire Internet that I'm signed up to, and it was all because of big flaws in 1Password 4 that I wanted to help bring attention to. I'll be gone from here as soon as those things are fixed. In the meantime I've been having some fun conversations here thanks to all of the free time that a perfected life workflow gives me. ;)

Hazel is good at what it does, but it just so happens that none of what it does is useful me in any way; nor to most people that use it judging by the lame usage cases most people have for it. It arouses that "wow, that's such a cool little gadget" thing in people, but only solves very specific problems and doesn't even really save time except in a few very specific cases, such as the automatic PDF naming. That's not worth $28 to me. And this is coming from a guy who would gladly pay $1000 each for all of the applications I have listed above. Price is not the same as value and I'll gladly pay a lot for great solutions, but there is no personal value to me in Hazel. Nor to most people, if you Google Hazel examples to see how others are using it. Most of them are doing completely useless things with it, mostly involving shuffling around worthless data that they shouldn't even have on their computer in the first place.

I like your PDF renaming/filing usage case and consider that one of the only legitimately good uses, but it didn't work for me. I really badly wanted it to be useful since it was so cool, but it just didn't happen.

The less information overflow you have in your life, the less need for something like Hazel since there'll be nothing for it to clean up.

However, I sincerely have to thank you once again for bringing Quicksilver back into my life. It doesn't replace spotlight, since it doesn't search inside of files, but that's secondary to the fact that it lets you instantly find things by filename/app name and do incredibly powerful things with those items. Greatest of all is the feature that lets you search through menu items to find things that lack shortcuts.

Those positive aspects aside, I'm still evaluating it carefully since many of its features aren't that vital. Searching for files/folders can be done in Spotlight. Quicksilver doesn't search inside of files. Finding menu items that lack keyboard shortcuts can already be done with BetterTouchTool (I've got "Opt+Z" which triggers "Show Application Menu," which opens a menu under the cursor with all available toolbar menus right there).

Quicksilver's menu search is very powerful but still needs to prove itself a lot more useful than the Opt+Z menu to actually be worth adding to the system.

However, here's the thing: No matter how I look at it, that keyboard search of menu bar items is indeed very powerful and almost single-handedly makes Quicksilver worth it. Add in all of the other features, such as the ability to do way more than just mere "Open" actions on files, and you've got something that's on the way to passing the entrance exam for being in my permanent toolbox.

As an editor, I deal with massive applications full of thousands of functions, and anything that helps me access those functions faster is worth having: KeyCue, BetterTouchTool's Opt+Z context menu... and now Quicksilver.

Thanks again. You managed to do the near-impossible: Finding an app that actually adds something valuable to my life. I'm leaning towards adding it to my workflow, but it'll have to keep proving itself useful for a while longer before I decide. That's how strict I am, and that's the reason why I'm not drowning in a sea of productivity tools. I don't pollute myself with a bunch of barely-useful things. Just select the best of the best - the truly revolutionary tools - and then stick with them and learn them inside and out. Do this, and you'll find that computers simplify your life rather than complicating it. There's more to life than the Internet and computers and technological frippery. :)

I got something out of this conversation: Quicksilver and some tips on 1Password 4 tagging. It was worth my time. I hope others got something out of what I've been saying as well.

I wish you all the best. ;)

@Xe997 But when it comes to file browsing, that is, clicking through folders (or tags) not really knowing what to look for, I prefer Quicksilver's way of right-arrowing and keyboard filtering.

Mind = blown. I hadn't realized it can drop down deeper into folders. To try it, I just opened Quicksilver and typed "Dow" (for Downloads) and then pressed the right-arrow... When I saw it list all files, I knew that the evaluation period was over. This is something I need. Not only does it textually search menu bar items (which is super useful even with the other tools I have in that arena), but it lets me drill down to files that I don't know the name of - and then lets me open, rename, edit, email, zip, open terminal, get info, and all of the myriad other things that Quicksilver can do. And once I've drilled down to a particular folder, further keyboard searches will filter within just that one folder. This is incredible.

You, sir, just instantly pushed Quicksilver over the threshold of "cool but not sure yet" into life-changing with that one sentence. It now provides plenty of revolutionary features and has earned a spot on my workstation. That's one hell of a feat.

Now that my eyes have been opened to such a feature, I can't imagine using Macs without it anymore.

Guess what? I'll be off to install it on the Mac Pro now. ;)

@Xe997 Thanks man, your explanations of Quicksilver tricks are not going unnoticed. I'm memorizing it all like a sponge. Quicksilver is the gift that keeps on giving. When I get back to the workstation's full-sized keyboard, I'm going to be setting up triggers for common item+action combos.

I wish QS also leveraged Spotlight under the hood to also provide full metadata searching via Spotlight's database. That way it could completely replace Spotlight and you wouldn't need to use both in conjunction like some sort of hackjob. There's a "Spotlight" plugin which is a year old, broken and clunky. Quicksilver would benefit greatly if they could add native Spotlight search support to it.

But that annoyance is no dealbreaker. I will in fact set Spotlight to Opt+Space, and let Quicksilver take the prominent and easier Cmd+Space command. In time, I'll probably barely find myself needing Spotlight's metadata search at all. Either way, Quicksilver is a swiss army knife that's here to stay. :)

Edit: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/73769/quicksilver-and-spotlight

I'm not alone in that concern. Seeing the response above, I'll be trying Alfred to see if it has any plugins that match the awesome things that Quicksilver can do. Quicksilver is awesome, and I don't expect Alfred to be as powerful, but we'll see. :) The features I need are folder-drilling, menu item searching, and the variety of actions that can be taken on files.

I'll report back. I'm trying Alfred 2 + the paid Powerpack now.

Holy.... shiiiiiiiiiiitttt.....

Sorry for swearing but Alfred just blew my mind. This is no slight against Quicksilver, which was fantastic, but where Quicksilver felt very hacky and hobbled-together by a community of enthusiasts, Alfred has incredible polish. It started as a Quicksilver ripoff, for sure, and I remember looking down on Alfred users years ago back when I used Quicksilver too. But now I've had a chance to try Alfred 2.

Searching menu bar items:

• In Quicksilver, searching the menu bar takes a lot of actions: Opt+Space, "Appname", tab, "Menu Bar Items", tab, "Help" (to search for help).
• In Alfred, it takes these steps: Opt+Space, "m help". That's it. "m " is the prefix that tells it to search the menu of the active application (you can change prefix of course).

The other incredible feature in Quicksilver was the way it can drill down into folders:

• In Quicksilver, you press the right arrow key.
• In Alfred, you press the Return key (configurable if you want it to be rightarrow/leftarrow instead, but by default that's for selecting actions and is better that way)

Quicksilver's biggest failing was the failure to integrate Spotlight data:

• In Quicksilver, you are stuck with filename-searches. If I search for "my book project," then I have to be damn sure that "my book project" is in the actual filename or I won't find it.
• In Alfred, all search results come from a seamless combination of Spotlight and Alfred. If I type "my book project" and that term occurs inside of a file, it will show up in Alfred. This feature can be turned on or off, if you'd prefer the Quicksilver way of just searching by filename.

When it comes to plugins/features, I still liked Quicksilver a lot, but let's compare them there as well:

• In Quicksilver, it comes with mostly several years-old, hacky plugins. Most of them have a date of 2012 or earlier, some as early as 2006-2007, and many don't work. The ones that do work are great, of course, but I couldn't shake the fact that it was open-source software with very few maintainers. Here are two screenshots of the full Quicksilver plugin list: One. Two. A third are half a decade old, the majority are from 2012, and anything but the latest from 2013 are in various states of being broken. And there are no maintainers, since it's all open source and hobbled-together.
• In Alfred, with the Powerpack, you have all the plugins you need. It comes with every prominent feature that I saw in Quicksilver, but in far more polished versions, such as superb iTunes integration. If you need more? Go to the forums. If you need even more? Write it yourself in any language you know. You can indeed write shell scripts, ruby scripts, python scripts, Objective-C programs - anything you can think of. As long as it returns an XML-spec to Alfred, it can be a plugin. That is how the Menu Bar search was implemented, by a user: http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/1993-menu-search/. That user did indeed write that he disabled traversing the History menu of Safari due to the high item count, but that's just because of the ruby script that guy uses for doing the menu parsing. Convert that plugin to Objective-C, or write it in a smarter way, and there'll be no issue no matter how many items it returns. And I don't put much stock in that comment anyway, because I tried menu searching with it and it was absolutely instant and gave a far better overview of results than Quicksilver's plugin. As for searching browser history items - Alfred does that built-in, no need to bog down the menu plugin with it.

So what about user interface? Well...

• In Quicksilver, you get a 3-pane view of Item + Action + Object, where you type something in, then press the downarrow to review the available search results that matched that query. It's slightly tedious (as demonstrated in the "searching menu bar items" bullet list above). Everything takes several key presses, tabbing, arrow keys, etc. You can set up triggers to simplify this, so that "F1" immediately performs "Get info on Current Item" etc, and I was planning to do exactly that, but...
• In Alfred, every available action is automatically mapped to the keyboard. You just type to find what you want, and then press something like Cmd+1 to do action 1, Cmd+2 to do action 2, etc. If you want "Quicksilver-style" triggers, you can easily define "hotkeys" for specific actions to be performed on the selected object. Not only that, but Alfred lets you define what's known as "text triggers", which are far better than Quicksilver's tedious searching. One example is the "m "-prefix example above which searches menu bar items. Another is "1p " which searches your 1Password database from within Alfred! I could for instance type "1p agilebits" and it'll show my agilebits results instantly, no need to tab around and mess around like in Quicksilver. I greatly prefer this method of searching, since it gives a fantastic overview of result items that you can apply the chosen action to. Adding to all of this, Alfred is gorgeous. There are loads of themes but the default is beautiful as well. It presents a large list with a great overview of all search results, unlike Quicksilver's insistence on showing one item at a time unless you press the downarrow or enable the permanent search-list.

The end result is that Alfred does everything Quicksilver does, and is far more polished, has Spotlight integrated (so that you can disable Spotlight from the mac menu bar and unbind its shortcut key!), has plugins for everything you need, lets you write your own plugins (or view the forums) for anything else that you can dream of, and feels like a real, slick product unlike the hacky "open-source swiss army knife where not everything works" that is Quicksilver. Perhaps most important of all - navigating the results in Alfred is a lot faster, thanks to the bigger results list and the keyboard-shortcuts for rapidly selecting the results further down the list.

Quicksilver was awesome. I'd suggest you too check out Alfred, however, because it's not what you think it is. :) I'll be off to buy a license now.

I always had this wrong idea that Alfred was the poor man's Quicksilver and just a rip-off. That couldn't be further from the truth. It's like Quicksilver with everything done right, in a slick, infinitely extendable package. Everything I liked about Quicksilver is there in Alfred in a slicker form, and when I saw that it lets me get rid of Spotlight completely it sealed the deal for me. With Alfred, I know that it's backed by commercial funding and will always be working with Apple's latest features.

I still owe you everything for planting the Quicksilver/Alfred idea in my mind. Without you, I wouldn't have either of these productivity enhancers. :) I used to dismiss Quicksilver because I remembered how buggy and unstable it was for me in 2008/2009, and I used to dismiss Alfred because I thought it was a Fisher Price version of Quicksilver. At least the latter statement was false; Alfred is amazing. Not sure about the former. Quicksilver is a lot better than it used to be, but I still managed to crash it 100% of the times I opened it, typed "itunes" and then pressed the downarrow. Heh. :P

Compare Quicksilver's small collection of plugins, most of which are half a decade old and/or broken: http://i.imgur.com/ksaIcqm.png http://i.imgur.com/7yiHdRA.png

With Alfred's 36 forum pages of user-contributed plugins:
http://www.alfredforum.com/forum/3-share-your-workflows/

That's a testament to how easy it is to write "workflows" - plugins written in any language you want to, such as shell scripting, AppleScript, Objective C, you name it. The ease of creating plugins really allowed Alfred to leverage the community.

Thirty-six pages, with 30 plugins (threads) per page, that's 1080 community plugins for Alfred, just counting in that forum.

If I want something custom, chances are it's already been written for me. If not, I can fire up my code editor and write something in python in an afternoon.

Brb going over to my workstation to buy Alfred, and then I'll go eat food. I got so caught up in Alfred's awesomeness that my food's gone cold. I even accidentally left the fridge open for an hour, because I had just planned to take a quick look at Alfred before lunch... ^_^