Why quicksilver over spotlight

Move the file you just downloaded to your Documents folder without leaving your browser. Add something to your To Do List as soon as you think of it.

Quicksilver allows you to process your thoughts instantly, and lets you get right back to what you want to be doing. Grab and go Select files or text and act upon them immediately. Quicksilver can grab the current selection from almost any application. Grab selected text to search for it on the web or append it to a file. Grab files and delete them, move them or send them.

Grab pictures to resize them or change their format above , the options are limitless. Keep Finder at arm's length Quicksilver allows you to do all sorts of things with files: move, copy, rename, delete, whilst also letting you navigate your entire file system.

Just add a few important top-level folders to the catalog and you can browse through your folders from there. Still not fast enough? If you find yourself doing something frequently, you can speed up the task even further by assigning a "trigger" to it. Triggers give you the power to assign regular tasks to keyboard shortcuts or mouse movements; you don't even need to activate Quicksilver. Interact with your installed applications; Mail, 1Password, Microsoft Office and more.

The reason I would like to retain Quicksilver is because it is a tiny bit faster and much more flexible. The main thing that I current use Spotlight for is searching within Mail. I use that all the time. For all the rest of opening applications and files, I use Quicksilver. Is there a way to eliminate Spotlight without losing the searching within Mail? Or alternatively, to reduce the overhead of Spotlight but still keeping it available for searches within Mail?

An additional Quicksilver annoyance is that on Mountain Lion, Quicksilver crashes fairly frequently. Alfred uses the Spotlight index by default, and LaunchBar also has an option to use it. The Spotlight index includes almost all files, so you don't have to adjust what files to index manually.

By default, Alfred is conservative in what types of files it searches for, to avoid muddying your search results. You can tick the boxes for what parts you want to be included in the results by default. If you want to search among all files on the system, you just need to press the spacebar before you begin typing the search term, and it will then search the full Spotlight index rather than just a subsection of it. If you always want it to search the full index, then you can enable that option in the preferences.

Despite the warning, Alfred is pretty usable and very fast even if you enable searching for all files. It still excludes the system files that are hidden from normal Spotlight results. But you can search for those by creating a search filter. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Jeez I love quicksilver. Quicksilver for a launcher and some tasks and Spotlight for file searches. Login or Join to answer. We had trouble talking to the server. Please try again. Your answer will be saved while you login or join.

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