LaunchBar Vs QuickSilver
April 26th, 2006 | Published in Mac, Tools I Use | 3 Comments
So this past two weeks I stopped using LaunchBar and started using QuickSilver, I had always been intrigued with the feature set of quicksilver, but I love and am addicted to LaunchBar. If you use a mac and don’t know these two apps, get out from under your rock and get addicted to them, they will improve the way you use your machine and you will wonder why you do not use them.
So after a week of using QuickSilver I do like it, I can understand why people like it, the extra stuff is wicked cool, but after two weeks I’m going back to LaunchBar. Probably the main reason is speed and learning. LaunchBar is way faster then QuickSilver. For me it is almost always instant, quicksilver is slowing me down (part of this I know is because I am more used to LaunchBar) it takes a while for it to come to the front, it takes a while to list the choices, and it doesn’t seem to learn that ‘int’ is short for interarchy (I know I should move to transmit, but I’m old and get stuck in my ways) and keeps opening the page for intuit.com no matter how many times I seem to down arrow to the right entry and click it. But there is cool stuff, append to text files rocks, creating an email right there is cool, there is neat stuff, but the app is supposed to make me faster and it doesn’t do that…
So if you use QS and you are addicted to it, I know that there are people out there. Tell me how to make it faster and learn better and I’ll give it another go.
July 6th, 2006 at 5:56 am (#)
Came here because I was looking for any tips for integrating Interarchy more closely with QuickSilver and couldn’t help but comment.
First up, while QuickSilver does learn which items are your favorites based on how often you choose them, you can also ‘teach’ Quicksilver which items to list first by typing your letters and then right-clicking on an item and choose ‘Set a default’ or ‘Reduce score’
After having done that with a few of my favorite programs, I can now type RD for ‘Remote Desktop Connection’, V gets me Chicken of the VNC, VL returns Video Lan Player and so on.
Second, Quicksilver is much, much faster if you take the time to setup your Catalogue. I chose my Applications, Download, Music, Documents, Sites, and Pictures folders. It is also very worthwhile to turn of the Actions you don’t use. I actually only have about 20 Actions ticked out of 125.
If you’re really picky you can also choose which filetypes are returned for each Custom Folder in your Catalogue. For the Applications I have ‘application’ .app, and .fold = folders. Sites has .php, .cfm, .html, .gif, .jpg, .swf, etc. Downloads has .zip, .sit, .fold, .img etc. This helps reduce junk matches like xml files in your itunes catalogue, or html helps file from your Applications catalogue. It sounds like a lot of work but these tweaks were done over several months as I started to learn the program and really make it work to my style.
Finally, it is definitely worth taking a look at the Flashlight interface. It looks just like Spotlight, only on the left hand side, and shows how QuickSilver is probably what Spotlight/Snotlight should have been.
September 6th, 2006 at 4:55 am (#)
“I know I should move to transmit”
Why? Interarchy kicks Transmit ass.
September 10th, 2007 at 11:24 am (#)
And Yummy FTP destroys both.