It's Quicksilver Monday at LivingWithMac.com. Today's video shows how actions work in Quicksilver. Actions are the heart of how Quicksilver works. Actions are the second step in using Quicksilver.

Once you select and object, such as an application, document, or folder, you need to decide what action to take. Examples would be moving, opening, renaming, and copying. Quicksilver actually has dozens of actions that can be taken and all of these actions are dependent on the object you have selected. It's all pretty cool and extremely useful.

Watch the video to see this in action. You can find more Quicksilver videos here.

Hack Attack: Advanced Quicksilver guide - slashes, appends, and proxies, oh my!

by Adam Pash

Last week we checked out the basics of our favorite Mac productivity application, Quicksilver. Then we took a close look under the hood at Quicksilver's preferences. Now it's time to dive a little deeper into advanced Quicksilver power-usin'.

With just a few keystrokes, you can use Quicksilver to forgo Finder, control iTunes, append text, and grab objects by proxy. Intrigued? Read on!

When it comes to grokking Quicksilver functions, seeing them in action is a lot better than reading about them. With that in mind, be sure to check out the screencasts below which demonstrate each technique in action.

Quicksilver instead of Finder

Here's the thing: Most times you want to grab a file or open a folder, you know exactly where it is, but you don't want to have folder and file shortcuts all over your Desktop. Rather than heading to the mouse, opening Finder, and then finding and clicking every folder you need to drill down to the right location, you can work your way through the folder tree from the comfort of the keyboard in a few short keystrokes.

Remember, the forward slash (/) drills down to the currently selected directory, while Shift-/ moves back up. The same thing works with the left and right arrows, but as soon as you get the hang of using the forward slash, you'll find it very quick and intuitive.

Generally, anything object that has a little arrow next to it in the search results can be drilled into. That's not strictly true, however, as you can see in the todo.txt example in the video. Just experiment a little and see what works. While claiming that you can replace Finder with Quicksilver may be a bit bold, you will notice that you spend a lot less time fussing around with Finder once you master this technique. If nothing else, the slash-technique is one helluva supplement to Finder and then some.

Quicksilver instead of iTunes

You could Cmd-Tab to iTunes and then search for a new song or album to play, or you could just pull up Quicksilver and pull off almost everything you can do in iTunes from the Quicksilver command interface.

And what's that, you say? We're using the forward slash (/) again? Yes we are! Like I said, you can use it for way more stuff than I've got time to mention here, but just experiment and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Just remember, you've got to install the iTunes plug-in through the plug-ins preferences to get the iTunes functionality you see in the video. Also, the video above is a nice basic introduction to Triggers, which are wildly useful, especially for those with a good imagination.

Grabbing objects by proxy

Sometimes while you're working, you'll want an object that's directly in front of you to jump into Quicksilver - after all, you've got a huge collection of actions you could potentially perform on that object. But you don't want to go through all the trouble, for example, of drilling through folders with Quicksilver just to get an object in there that's already in front of your face.

That's where the proxy objects come in handy. In the video, I take a look at Cmd-Esc, which will grab almost anything in the foremost application (whether it's a file, a folder, a selected bit of text, or something else - again, just experiment) and pipe it into the Quicksilver command interface. Cmd-G will pull the selected Finder item into Quicksilver if it's already been invoked. You can set Cmd-G to work the same way as Cmd-Esc (i.e., pull whatever is foremost into Quicksilver) through the Extras section of the preferences.

There are actually a lot more proxy objects out there, but Cmd-Esc and Cmd-G are the two I use all the time, every day. I should probably acknowledge that the multiple-file example I use is somewhat trivial, since the folder I copy to is right there (I wanted to make sure you could see what was happening), but you can easily imagine how this could be useful in other situations.

Quick text append

If you love lists and plain text, life doesn't get any better than the Append to... command (requires the Text manipulation plug-in). I live and die by Append to, and you should, too!

And then?

There are so many more things you can do with Quicksilver, but that's where I'm going to stop for today. In general, I tried to focus on working within the framework of Quicksilver rather than focusing too much on plug-in-specific actions. If you master navigating with Quicksilver and getting objects you want to work with into the command window, learning to run actions with that object is a breeze. Like I said before, you'll have done your Quicksilver magic a huge favor by taking a good look at the Actions list and just trying out different combinations.

If your interest has been piqued, you should check out a few of the following:

• The Comma trick
• Menubar access
• Timed reminders
• Upload to Flickr
• Google Calendar Quick-add
• An in-depth look at Quicksilver proxies
• Create new files with Quicksilver