A spotlight on Spotlight

I’d love it if the Quicksilver folks would add a short “this is what Quicksilver does that Spotlight doesn’t” page to their site. Even so, this is a good place to start.

There are strengths to both tools. Personally, I find Spotlight an excellent search tool — a bit more effective than Quicksilver. Spotlight is so tightly integrated into OS/X that it will likely always excel here. Searching text in PDF files, for instance. Also, the ability to save Spotlight searches as virtual folders is a wonderful feature. Spotlight also searches comments that can be attached to any file in the Finder, making it a great indexing tool.

On the other hand, Quicksilver provides more power. Spotlight is all about finding information, whereas Quicksilver lets me perform operations on what it finds. Moving files, executing scripts, and looking inside of files. For instance, let’s say I want to attach some comments to a group of files so I can find them later with Spotlight. Quicksilver makes it easy: Select the files in the Finder, invoke Quicksilver, press Cmd-G to load the files, press tab and type “set comments.” Quicksilver lets me act on the files as a whole, which is a very, very handy feature.