Ever since I downloaded Quicksilver from Blacktree, which was I think shortly after I purchased my Mac, I have wondered how I ever lived without a program like this on Windows. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest little applications for Mac OS X.

So, for my tweep @KellyCDB, who has tried Quicksilver twice but found it lacking, I am going to hopefully convince her otherwise with some really slick things you can do.

For starters, Quicksilver is an application launcher. It is a nice way to keep your dock uncluttered (I am still guilty of this, but such is life). Simply press Ctrl+Space to open it and start typing in the name of the application you want to launch:

A nice little drop down will appear where you can can use your arrow keys to scroll down and select the application you want to launch if it doesn’t show up in the main Quicksilver window. Just press enter when you find it. Of course, if you want to do something other than open, you can press Tab to move to the second pane of the Quicksilver window and choose other options:

If this were all Quicksilver could do for you, you might wonder what the point is when you can do a lot of the same stuff with Spotlight. Where Quicksilver really starts to shine in in the plugins:

Let’s say you want to send an email to one of your contacts. Install the Apple Address Book plugin, open up Quicksilver, and start typing in the name of your contact. Once you select it in the first pane, tab to the second pane and select compose email. Apple Mail will open and a new email will start for that contact:

Pretty basic and something fairly simple, but wait, there’s more. This one is one of my favorites. I use Screen Capture all the time to get image captures when I am at work. A lot of the time, it is easier to show someone a picture than to try to describe the problem to them. Quicksilver has some pretty slick things you can do with Screen Capture. Make sure you have the Screen Capture plugin installed first, then open Quicksilver and start typing in Capture:

We are going to do this with Capture Region, select it, press enter, and you will get your cursor for selecting the region. Click to capture and you will immediately be taken right by to Quicksilver with more options for what you can do with you screen cap you just took:

These are just a few of the items I like to use best, but here are some links to other ways you can use Quicksilver:
Quicksilver: From A Better OS X To Even More – Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

Quicksilver – A Better OS X In Just 10 Minutes – Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

Another Quicksilver Tutorial: Gold Trigger – Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

Hack Attack: The Quicksilver video extravaganza – Application Launcher – Lifehacker

Screenshot Tour: A look under the hood of Quicksilver – Feature – Lifehacker

Hack Attack: Advanced Quicksilver guide – slashes, appends, and proxies, oh my! – Application Launcher – Lifehacker

How to install Linux applications in OS X – a complete walkthrough – Simple Help – The bottom of this article tells you how you can launch those applications with Quicksilver.

There are many more tutorials and articles floating around for advanced ways to use Quicksilver. It is just one of those things I don’t know how I could live without.

And just as an addendum, I used Quicksilver to resize all 4 of the full screen captures I took at the exact same time. Yay for Quicksilver.