Automating menus with Quicksilver (and other tricks)

I had enough trouble getting this working, so I thought I’d pass on my thanks to Rui for helping point me in the right direction, and my own details on what you can do with menus in Quicksilver.

So what’s so great about menus in Quicksilver? Well, two things really. The most important is that Quicksilver treats the menus as searchable content and, furthermore, it learns what you use most frequently making it easy to invoke those commands. For example, rather than using my mouse to explore menus and invoke Edit > Create Link > URL With Clipboard I can type my menu trigger key and “UC” (for “URI from Clipboard”). Quicksilver has learned, over time, that I use that command a lot and therefore matches it very easily.

Borrowing from Rui’s site, here are the “quick-start” instructions:

1. Updating to the latest bleeding edge Quicksilver and enable advanced features. If you want to try Constellation menus (below) then turn on “beta” features as well.
2. Install the User Interface Access plugin.
3. Enable proxy objects in the catalog (under the Quicksilver tab).
4. Create a trigger for the Current Application (hence you having enabled proxy objects) and pick “Show Menu Items” from the action list. (You don’t want the “Menu Bar…” or “Menu Bar Items…” actions, those provide menu tree structure not the menu choices).

Basic menu access is pretty straightforward and usually quicker, and easier, than reaching for the mouse. Keyboard shortcuts are faster, but only if you know them — and Quicksilver gives you access to all menu items, not just the ones that have shortcuts.

The other thing that’s cool are Constellation menus. Constellation menus are currently beta, so you’ll need to turn on advanced features and “beta” support to use them, then load the Constellation plugin.

Constellation menus are more gorgeous that useful, though. You can set up a trigger to activate the menus (using the Show Radial Menu action, just as we did above for regular menus). A preconfigured action tied to F6 brings up iTunes radial menus (shown to the left).

The main drawback in the current beta Constellation plugin is that keyboard navigation is not supported at all — so, you get beautiful pictorial menus and spatial navigation, but you have to switch to a mouse. It also tends to be a little bit slower than standard menu access because of all the icon rendering. Even so, it’s a fun way to navigate iTunes and explore applications — and qualifies as a “neat Mac trick” for all your Windows-using friends. Hopefully we’ll see an update that supports smart keyboard navigation, making Constellation menus not only pretty, but truly useful.

While I’m on the topic of using Quicksilver to make your life better, I just discovered the handy iCal To-Do action. I’m not sure when it was added, but it makes creating new tasks in iCal a breeze. It’s as simple as taking something from the clipboard or by typing a few words and keying “TD” (for “To-Do,” which Quicksilver has learned as my desired action for those keys). Viola! I’ve captured a task quickly and easily, without interrupting my workflow.

Another handy little trick for anyone using beta features: If you load the Image Manipulation Actions plugin, you can select multiple image files and perform quick batch operations on them. For instance, from the Finder where I have several images selected, typing “command-g sca” and the image action “20×20 jpg” spits out a 20×20 icon for every image file I selected. Command-g is the Quicksilver trigger to load all selected files from the Finder. “Sca” are the keys Quicksilver needs to find the “Scale Image…” action. That’s it, instant icons in just a few seconds.