This is the first entry in a periodic series about Quicksilver, an application launcher/Swiss Army knife for Mac OSX.

“That’s vague,” you’re saying.  ”What is it really?”

Well, that’s hard to describe.  That’s what I think this periodic series will help to identify.

I’ve been a Quicksilver user for a long time, but have only recently been trying to really harnass it’s power.  Always before I used it to launch applications that I don’t use often enough to give it space on my Dock.  What I did was lauch Quicksilver (Cmd-. on my machine, but that is configurable) and start typing the name.  Generally the default action is to open, but that can be changed as well.  In fact Quicksilver will change it for you.  Yeah, you read that correctly.  Quicksilver monitors your patterns and choses what you usually chose as the default.

But you can do much more than that.  Start typing a name of someone in your Address book and you can compose an email to them.  Start typing the name of the file (like a NeoOffice file), and open that in proper application.  Or, instead of choosing ”Open”, choose “Email to . . ” and then type the name of someone in your address book.

So how does all of this work?  Here is my overview:

• Start Quicksilver (again, on my machine it’s Cmd-.).
• Start typing the name of your file.  Not the right file?  Hit right arrow to choose another file with the same beginning.
• Hit Tab to move to the Action field.
• Start typing the name of your action.  Not the right one?  Again, choose the right arrow to choose the appropiate action.
• If you are done, hit “Enter” to execute.  But in the example above, it needed another item (because it needs to know who to email to!).  So hit Tab and choose the item like the two above steps.

In the above example, an email will be started with me as the addressee with that file already attached.  Neat, huh?

There are other neat tricks.  If you start typing “Documents” as your first item, then hit right arrow, you will get a menu of all the files in your Documents folder.  Highlight one, then hit Tab to choose it.  Then you will be able to choose your action on it (Open, Email, Move to Trash, etc.)

I hope this is enough to get you started in Quicksilver.  The very initial curve is a little rough  (hitting Tab to chose things, for example, took me a bit) but using it a little bit you will find it becomes very natural.  Obviously there are more tricks than this, and I will share more in the future.