Creative use of tags

[Deleted User]

I'm sorry to hear that you converted. Still, I feel the need to clarify some things so readers of this thread are not misinformed:

The basic idea of Quicksilver is the action (verb) and object (noun) metaphor. Adding to this is the ways of taking shortcuts, and I'm not only talking about triggers. This is extremely important in the understanding of why return does not drill into the folder. That is because return executes the selected action and the default action for folders happens to be "Open" which means "Open in Finder". The action you are looking for is "Show contents", which is what right arrow does. Also, it makes sense that right arrow drills in because left arrow do the opposite. In Alfred, I guess it's a simple check box that allows you to change what return does?

With Quicksilver, because of the action/object metaphor, it is much more flexible. I just rank the Show contents higher than the Open action. No need to wait for the developer to add some specific preference, because with Quicksilver there is a more general solution.

And about the menu search: Of course a trigger must be made for this. You are not supposed to have remember the name of the current application you are in, instead you create a trigger that consists of the object "Current application" and "Show menu items" and map it to some shortcut. I use ctrl + space for this. It gets me straight to search. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is Alfred learning menu items? Quicksilver quickly learns that I'm looking for Help if I type "he". This is the case with actions and items as well.

About the Alfred cmd + number for actions. Why have to look at an action list to know what action to choose? With Quicksilver, I search for an object (or navigate to it) I could tab to the second pane and search for an action (no need for down arrow). But sure, this can get tiresome with often used actions. That is why there is a quicker way of selecting actions without ever having to select the second pane, and without having to look at an action list! To choose the "Show info" action, simply press cmd + shift + i. The "Open with" action? Cmd + shift + W. Eject disk? cmd + shift + E. Quicksilver dynamically creates shortcuts depending on what it thinks is the action you want.

About the bookmarks: yeah, I agree they are not needed in the menu search because they are included in the catalog. This is of course true for Quicksilver as well (regardless of browser).

To sum it up, Alfred, as any application, forces you to learn things like the text shortcuts, and to configure stuff.

Quicksilver forces you to learn a basic metaphor (return selects the action for the item, no exceptions) but once you learned and understand that one you can truly use Quicksilver in the most amazing ways, without having to depend on someone elses view of how things should work. If you do not have the desire to learn this, then Quicksilver is not the right choice, I agree. There is also no doubt that Alfred is prettier and more actively developed. If you only used Quicksilver for a couple of days, then switching to Alfred will indeed convert you. But actually using Quicksilver for weeks and months, giving it time to learn your typing, and giving you time to discover all the wonderful strange things it will do for you, then the choice is not so clear. You could argue that the application from the start should appeal to you, and this is a fair argument. Still, I will continue to use Quicksilver because of how I don't need to think much at all when using it, given that I accept the basic concept.

EDIT: Also, must bring this up: you state that "but I don't waste time surfing the web so that was no use to me either."

but then you clearly state how awesome the Alfred forum is? Should I have to browse some nerdy forum to get core functionality into my app? I prefer how the Quicksilver allows me to construct new uses of it, without having to download extras. For instance, the top/kill "workflow" I saw in that thread: with Quicksilver I just right arrow into Activity Monitor, choose the process and the action Kill. Or I could just search for any process and choose Kill. The same with the "Go to current file", no need for such a specific plugin in Quicksilver when the basic building blocks (Current document) and "Reveal"/Open in Terminal already are there. And "wallpaper workflow"? Just choose the action "Set desktop picture" in Quicksilver.

And of course, nothing stops you from using Applescript as part of you Quicksilver triggers. For instance, I logout from Gmail using the trigger cmd + ctrl + G.

benfdc

Speaking of which - this is the only forum on the entire Internet that I'm signed up to, and it was all because of big flaws in 1Password 4 that I wanted to help bring attention to.

Got a bit more than you bargained for, eh?

[Deleted User]

Got a bit more than you bargained for, eh?

Don't joke, this is seriouz internet business. Ok, I'm gonna leave this thread now. Tags are good.

Uno_Lavoz

I'm sorry to hear that to converted. Still, I feel the need to clarify some things so readers of this thread are not misinformed.

That's a good thing. You are the Quicksilver authority here and I am not anti-Quicksilver at all. :) I am completely neutral to both apps and just picked whichever did everything I need in the most polished manner. That happened to be Alfred due to its commercial development team + thousands of community plugins.

Return in Quicksilver executes the current action. To enter subfolders, you use the arrow keys.

In Alfred, return executes the current action, which for folders is to go into the subfolders. There are settings that turn left-arrow and right-arrow into folder navigation instead, as well as being able to change the default return-action for folders.

It's just a different metaphor, and one which I am very comfortable with. In quicksilver, the most common action was "Open". That's the case in Alfred too. Search for something and press enter and it'll launch. To get at other actions, you have 3 options: Bind a hotkey to perform that action on the current item (same as Triggers in Quicksilver). Alternatively, press the right-arrow to reveal actions (there are probably other keys I'm missing) which you can then select with the keyboard or with Cmd+1, Cmd+2, etc. The third option is to write a Workflow trigger for it, such as "d " having these properties: Searches for files in ~/Downloads, default on-return action being Open. Then you can just type "d pdf" to list all pdfs in the downloads folder, and then Cmd+1, Cmd+2 (or arrow keys + return) to open the result you wanted, or the right-arrow key to bring up the additional actions. It's really just a different way of doing things, and one which felt much more natural to me than Quicksilver. With Alfred, I know that I'm in control and can choose to bind hotkeys or text based selectors.

Quicksilver lets you rank certain actions higher than others.

Alfred too. There's an option to let it learn from which actions you use most often. However, that's stupid and misses the point of Alfred, which is that actions are in predictable places. So you don't have to think. You know that Cmd+8 is "Get Info," etc. But beyond all of that, Alfred isn't intended to keep you constantly switching actions through text-typing and arrow-keys and tab-keys and whathaveyous. Instead, you are supposed to think in terms of Workflows, which you saw an example of above: "d pdf", where "d " is the workflow prefix, and "pdf" is the search term, with this example workflow being set up to search your ~/Downloads folder. So, you get this completely natural environment where you bring up alfred, type "m help" and boom, you got the menu. Or, you could bind that to a hotkey, so that ctrl+space brings up "m " and lets you type the rest. Hotkeys can perform actions on the selected item, so no worries there.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is Alfred learning menu items? Quicksilver quickly learns that I'm looking for Help if I type "he". This is the case with actions and items as well.

Yeah, I had to look this up since I'm new to Alfred, and saw that it does indeed learn everything no matter the data-source. If you write a plugin that searches menu bar items (like in the example plugin we've been discussing), then Alfred will learn that: "Plugin = menubar, Search term = he, Most commonly picked results: Help... etc..." - This even annoyed some developer who wanted his plugin's returned XML result order to be honored, and Alfred re-ordered it for the user based on what the user most often selected: http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/1332-alfred-v2-not-honoring-xml-order-in-script-filter/ (and the Alfred lead developer let that guy know that what he should do is provide a random UID for his results, so that Alfred will not match them up to previously-learned results; he also said that Alfred forgets about unused results after a month so they don't clutter up the database. Awesome.)

It learns everything regardless of whether it's a built-in or third-party workflow, so the next time you type "m he" it will indeed bring up help first.

About the Alfred cmd + number for actions. Why have to look at a action list to know what action to choose? With Quicksilver, I search for an object (or navigate to it) I could tab to the second pane and search for an action. But sure, this can get tiresome with often used actions. That is why there is a quicker way of selecting actions without ever having to select the second pane, and without having to look at an action list! To choose the "Show info" action, simply press cmd + shift + i. The "Open with" action? Cmd + shift + W. Eject disk? cmd + shift + E.

In the search field, Cmd+1 refers to the 1st result, Cmd+2 to the 2nd, result, etc, which makes perfect sense. Then, when you get into the actions, all actions are in a fixed order so that Cmd+1 is always the same thing, Cmd+2 is always the same thing, etc. I don't need to look at anything to know what I'm doing. And if I want some 3rd party workflow-action, I bind it either to a hotkey (like ctrl+space bringing up the "m " menu-item search), or I rely on the "m he" (for menu help) text-based triggers. I am never at a loss for awesome ways to do things in Alfred. It's equally fast. Faster if you count the text-based triggers and keyboard hotkeys, which I'll be setting up for everything I do repeatedly. Even faster if you consider that Alfred is limitless in what "actions" it can do, whereas Quicksilver is limited to a smallish number of plugins.

In fact here's something very cool in Alfred that I have not seen in Quicksilver: Cmd+Opt+\ brings up the Alfred actions panel (even if Alfred is closed), with the current Finder file selected in it and ready to have actions applied to it.

Uno_Lavoz

But actually using Quicksilver for weeks and months, giving it time to learn your typing, and giving you time to discover all the wonderful strange things it will do for you, then the choice is not so clear. You could argue that the application from the start should appeal to you, and this is a fair argument. Still, I will continue to use Quicksilver because of how I don't need to think much at all when using it, given that I accept the basic concept.

There's no doubt that Quicksilver is absolutely fantastic and I was close to installing it on my main machine, until I saw Alfred. They both support hotkeys/triggers for keyboard-based control. Alfred additionally lets you define your own super-advanced text-based triggers such as "movie Superman" querying three different movie review sites at once. Alfred has thousands of advanced plugins (workflows), over a thousand in their user-forum alone, as opposed to the low number in Quicksilver, so you can do faaaaaar more with Alfred than Quicksilver. It's ridiculously easy to program a plugin in any language, since all it has to do is return an XML format with the search results. And Alfred learns everything about what result-items you choose most often.

There are pros and cons to each, but for every pro in Quicksilver, I found an equivalent or superior version of that feature in Alfred.

I like the way Quicksilver has the power of having a searchable list of actions that you can take on an item, but I found myself fiddling too much with it. In Alfred, I'll set up hotkeys (such as ctrl+space) and text triggers. For instance, one of the first things I'll do is set up ctrl+space to bring up the menu-bar search module. I like that I can easily design my own workflows with the graphical editor, where I can drag in lego-like blocks that run scripts, query external sites, gather XML, and display it all to me in Alfred. I could do so much more with it than Quicksilver's model, which is limited to the actions it gives you, and the triggers you set up. In Alfred, I'll set up things like "1p agilebits" to search 1Password for agilebits, and "im Superman" to query IMDb for Superman and return the result as XML, in other words viewable right inside of Alfred's beautiful results list, without even having to go to the website.

Pros and cons to each. They have very different workflows, but overall Alfred smacks of beautiful presentation and has thousands of plugins, as opposed to ~90 in Quicksilver, where a third of them are half a decade old and lots were broken. I tried the Spotlight plugin, and it gave no results. I typed in "itunes" and pressed the downarrow, and Quicksilver crashed every time I did that, etc.

The only thing Quicksilver has going for it is the way you can search for actions, textually, and I'd even argue that one, since you can set up hotkeys (keyboard shortcuts) and text-based triggers for those things in Alfred, so you don't need to search for actions textually like Quicksilver wants you to.

Now take the thousands of Alfred plugins and it's not even a competition anymore. I mean... I'd love to write my own Alfred plugins, but I don't think I can, because every feature I can dream of has already been written by someone and exists out there among the over 1000 user-written plugins for it. :O

Uno_Lavoz

@benfdc Got a bit more than you bargained for, eh?

That phrase usually implies something bad. It's true that we went really in-depth in this thread, but I walked away with Alfred (Quicksilver would have been pretty good as well but not nearly as powerful) and some great tips for 1Password 4 tags.

Sure, we spent some time talking here, but in just a week, Alfred will have more than paid for itself time-wise. Every minute spent here will soon be made up for in savings by Alfred. It's no longer just about "Get Info" on files or stuff like that like in Quicksilver. Alfred can do literally anything. You could write a script that controls space rockets if you wanted to. You can do anything in Alfred and then bind it to hotkeys or text-triggers. And the hotkeys are system-wide, so Alfred doesn't even have to be open!

So yes in that sense I got a lot more than what I bargained for. This rocks! :D I thought Quicksilver was powerful, until I saw what happens when you take the same idea and make it easy to develop plugins for it: You get thousands of community-developed plugins.

@Xe997 Don't joke, this is seriouz internet business. Ok, I'm gonna leave this thread now. Tags are good.

Seriously? I hope you never felt that we were arguing or that I was attacking you. I never take "srs internet business" seriously. In fact, I don't even want to see arguments, so my Safari is loaded up with two awesome plugins: Ghostery with 100% blocking which hides the comment-fields on almost all websites, and "YouTubeOptions" which hides ALL comments on ALL YouTube videos. ;) Bliss.

I was fully on board with Quicksilver and about to install it on the workstation, until I saw something that did things even better. And it's all thanks to you that I now have Alfred. You are responsible for saving me several hours every week from now on. You should be proud about that. :)

Edit: Turns out that you can do text-based searching of actions in Alfred too, just like in Quicksilver. So if you want to select a file, and then type "ge" for the "Get Info" action, then you can do that. Or, you can define a hotkey trigger that performs "Get Info" on the currently selected item. Or, you can define a text-based trigger like "gi [search term]" to instantly perform "get info" on the search result. No matter where I look, it matches and exceeds Quicksilver in every way, yikes... It's clear that the Alfred developers have looked at Quicksilver and made sure that every good aspect of Quicksilver was carried over into Alfred, and then they added a billion other awesome things on top of that.

Edit: There we go. I set up a Hotkey which means that no matter where I am on the system, I can just press Ctrl+Space and it brings up Alfred in menu-search mode for the current application, where I can just start typing the menu item I am looking for:

Trying it now on Safari (you'll also note that the consistent Cmd+1, Cmd+2 etc shortcuts are a great aid for quickly selecting the right result rather than scrolling down manually):

Hotkeys are system-wide and can do anything: They can run workflows on the currently selected item in OS X, or use your clipboard text, or a pre-defined static string (such as making F11 always trigger a certain workflow with a certain text-argument, to make the hotkey instantly do the same thing every time). Or, they can bring up Alfred with pre-entered text/pre-selected items. Here's the dialog for defining new hotkeys:

And if you pay close attention, you'll note that these various lego-blocks are connected with wires. You can put in lego blocks for things like running scripts, opening websites, writing to files, running system commands/actions, etc. You could literally have 1 hotkey or keyword pull off a whole symphony of actions all at once. There's no limit to how many separate actions each workflow can trigger.

Here's an example of multiple actions again:

You can literally automate anything on the computer. Let's also not forget that Alfred uses Spotlight under the hood for the file-search portion of the program, meaning that you can disable the Spotlight menu item and hotkey and use Alfred exclusively. It uses OS X's internal usage based ranking where the default 'importance' and ranking of files is provided by OS X. This means that your most-used files will always be at the top of Alfred's list, no matter if you've ever searched for them in Alfred before. No need to wait for its self-learning to detect what files you use the most. That's awesome.

And you'll never be at a loss for scripts/actions, since the community has created way over a thousand of them. This is awesome. This is digitally life-changing on the level of 1Password, OmniFocus and DEVONthink.

I'll also be taking a bow now. I got way more than I bargained for, and I am happy I did. :D Time to go be incredibly productive with Alfred.