As most of you know, I’m a bit of a Mac fanboy. In the years that I have spent using my Macbook Pro, I’ve come to absolutely fall in love with Quicksilver. Now this isn’t going to be a walk through or tutorial of Quicksilver basics. I’m going to assume that you already know some of the basic stuff about Quicksilver, like how to change your preferences and install plug-ins. If you don’t, head on over to the Quicksilver tutorials page here and do a bit of reading. Or you could always just hunt me down and I’d be glad to set your system up.
However, I do want to talk about some of the nifty ways that you can use Quicksilver to “act without doing”. So let’s get down to it!
Clear Out That Dock!
When I first started using OS X, I absolutely hated the fact that you had only two ways to access your applications: either load them up on the dock or hunt through the Applications folder. Well, as you’ll quickly learn, Quicksilver is very smart about finding files and applications in your system. So go ahead, free yourself from insanely wide docks and trust Quicksilver to be able to find the applications that your’ looking for when you type them out.
Run Terminal Commands
You’re going need to install the Terminal Module (and possibly Command Line Tools?) plug-in for this one.
For one thing, this plug-in lets you type out shell commands in Quicksilver, and Quicksilver will go ahead and start up a new terminal for you and run that command for you.
- Launch Quicksilver (^ + Space)
- Type “.” without quotes. This puts Quicksilver into text-entry mode
- Type your shell command (i.e. “ls -a”)
- Press Tab
- Start typing “Terminal” or use the down arrow to find the option “Run a Text Command in Terminal” and press Enter
You can also launch shell scripts from Quicksilver using this plug-in as well. Find your shell script in Quicksilver, then run it using the same option “Run a Text Command in Terminal”
Search Google or Wikipedia
You’ll need the Web Search Module plug-in for this one.
Using this plug-in, you can perform Google or Wikipedia searches inside Quicksilver! To get it all set up, you will have to do a bit of bookmarking. Head on over to Google and search for “***” without quotes. Go ahead and bookmark that page somewhere. Do the same thing with the Wikipedia site. You should now be set up to use the web search!
To get started, just start typing “Google” and find the option similar to the one in the picture above. Quicksilver might not find it right away, but with a bit of training, every time you start typing “Go” it’ll show that option for you 
Once you’ve found it, go ahead and tab-over to the third pane and type in what you’re looking for. Once you’ve pressed Enter, Quicksilver will launch a new browser/new tab and Google your search term!
A note for Firefox users, Quicksilver + Leopard + Firefox seem to hate each other. If you try to do a search and Firefox is not running, Firefox will simply run but it won’t do the search. Annoying, I know.
Copy, Delete, and Move Files Around
I think I’ve talked about this before, but I hate the Finder. Sometimes, I know exactly what I want to move, and where I want to move it, but the directories are really really far away from each other. So what’s a man to do, wrangle with the Terminal? Quicksilver to the rescue!
But a short Quicksilver usability lesson first: did you know you can select multiple files/folders by hitting the comma button? Try it out! Go to your Documents folder or something, highlight a file, and hit the comma button on your keyboard. Now go select another file or folder, and hit comma again. Quicksilver will remember your selections and apply the same action to all of your selected items. So tab over to the action pane and select Move To… Tab over again and specify your destination. This could be a folder, or hell, it could be your Trash. Easy eh?
Lightning Fast Shutdowns and Restarts
You’ll need the Extra Scripts plug-in for this one.
This one’s simple, it lets you Sleep, Restart, or Shutdown your Mac from Quicksilver. Install the plug-in and type Sleep, Restart or Shutdown and Run that baby. Its super-effective for the ultra-lazy!
And that’s all that I can think of for now. These are my most frequently used Quicksilver actions; there’s a lot more out there, so feel free to share your Quicksilver tricks in the comments below!