beatworm.co.uk

Quicksilver is one of the very best things you can do with your Mac . I adore it. To describe simply, it superimposes a keyboard interface over the Macintosh interface in a very natural way, directly appealing to any keyboard junkie.

Most quicksilver operations involve navigating a hierarchy of lists, precisely the sort of thing that would be a frustrating exercise in imprecision with a mouse. Navigating them by typing is a breeze. Incremental search, next and previous item, forwards, backwards. Until recently, I had thought that the directional commands were restricted to the arrow keys, which was unfortunate as I dislike reaching for the arrow keys on most keyboards. C-n and C-p work for next and previous as they tend to in many Cocoa applications, but for forward and back I was still using the left and right arrows in the inverse ‘T’.

No more. I recently discovered that ‘/’ and ‘?’ were bound to these commands, much closer to the home row. Further reading led me to discover how to customise these bindings. Like most things Quicksilver, this is barely documented. Creating a property list file at

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/KeyBindings.qskeys

with contents like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>QSSearchObjectView</key>
	<dict>
		<key>^f</key>
		<string>moveRight:</string>
		<key>^b</key>
		<string>moveLeft:</string>
	</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Will allow C-f to move forward into a list, and C-b to move back up, which is more in line with how my fingers expect applications to work. The master definition file can be found in the application bundle

Quicksilver.app/Contents/Frameworks/QSInterface.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DefaultBindings.qskeys

and should give some ideas about things that you can set. Scanning through the default actions that are bound is an education too. I’m not even sure what half of the entries represent yet.

A: With a dalmatian.

Jack originally hails from a breeder based in South Wales, and so a holiday cottage weekend in that region makes for some kind of homecoming. Extremely lucky with the weather, randomly selecting a furiously sunny weekend immediately following a washed out Bank Holiday. Fun time for all, although Jack didn’t seem too settled with the sleeping arrangements.

We managed a couple of exciting excursions. A wildly optimistic walk through what turned out to be some managed wetlands; escorting a strong excitable dog held back by a thin cord across rickety walkways suspended over bogland, like some super-hazardous Crystal Maze task. Later, the closest thing to mountaineering myself and Jack are ever likely to manage - in essence, strolling up a very large hill, a forty-five minute affair to the summit at best. In fairness to the dog, he did actually indulge in some of your actual climbing, with rocks and verticals and what-not. Myself, I kept to the handy path provided.