The nice thing about Quicksilver’s indexing is you can be very specific in the way you set it up. You can specify some folders with indexing going 3 levels deep, or other folders that are indexed without it going any deeper. Look into the CATALOGS section of the Preferences. There’s lots of stuff in there to tweak.

Also, you can set how often Quicksilver indexes – I think mine is every 10 minutes. The more regularly it runs, the more cycles it may consume, but then again it’ll satisfy that instant need you refer to.

I guess it all boils down to your preference – keyboard or mouse? I like my hands on the keyboard as often as possible – it only slows me down having to reach for a mouse. But Plugins seem to be slowly popping up for Spotlight. I’d hope that Leopard (10.5) comes with a more open framework for adding Spotlight Plugins.

Also, I wonder if some of quicksilver’s other functionality can be grafted onto the spotlight interface via plugins, even for finder. a lot of this translates to document / file actions which would normally live in the right-click context menu.

leaving all this in place outside of QS would make it mostly a handy interface to spotlight, which i think would be the ideal model these days.

Quicksilver really wasn’t as useful for me as Butler is. I use Butler to create key combination for things like iTunes. I also use it as an application launcher, and that’s all it’s set to index.

to find anything else, I use Spotlight.

When I tried out quicksilver last, it was quite a while ago, I might try it out again to see if it’s improved a bit…

One great advantage of QS is that it “operates in the current (GUI) context”. In other words, when I’m e.g. working in Mail, I can access QS facilities with both my mind and the UI still in “Mail mode”, whereas moving to a shell context would slow me down.

Wrt. Spotlight vs. QS, it’s worth mentioning the Quicksilver Spotlight query module, which allows updating the catalog using Spotlight queries instead of (or better, in addition to) the more traditional file system scans. For example, I added a “kind:app” query and removed the various application folders: The net result is a lot snappier in my case (I’m a developer with apps all over the place; previously, QS was cataloguing a lot of unnecessary files because my application directories were too coarsely defined).

I prefer QuickSilver (to the shell) for launching apps and looking up entries in an address book and looking up bookmarked URLs. I find it faster to hit cmd-space p-r-e to open Preview than to use the “open” command on the terminal because open doesn’t care for PATH. It is much easier to cmd-space and type the first few chars of a person’s name and have the address book entry pop-up than any other method I know, including using the dashboard. Likewise with URLs.

Spotlight is much slower for the kind of things that QS is good for, but it’s strength is a detailed indexing of documents, which means I can now keep all downloaded docs in one folder without attempting to impose a structure on it.

I find I have little use for Dashboard. After I’ve been using the system for a while, the dashboard widgets get swapped out and they take a non-negligible amount of time to swap back in. More memory would fix it.

And the UNIX shell really is a revolution waiting for you to discover it. It’s not just a CLI, it’s a whole environment… back before GUIs were practical, it was the UNIX shell that had people cloning it the way people cloned the Xerox Star and the Mac.

I can visualise a GUI shell that’s a capable as the UNIX shell. I haven’t played with Automator (I’m still on Panther), but it sounds like it might get part way there. Really, though, you should be able to build pipelines graphically, so you can run a program or drag the output to another waiting script and tie it all together ad hoc as you need it.

I think the draw of Quicksilver though, is it provides all that CLI functionality (POWER) to the layman. (and puts it in a pretty wrapper to boot!)

I’m marginally proficient using the CLI, but not enough to do all these things so effortlessly. Thus, QS rules me – as I suspect it rules many others as well.

Do most *nix gurus prefer the CLI to Quicksilver? just curious.

I installed Quicksilver and used it for a while, but I found that I wasn’t using it for anything I couldn’t do in the shell. And the shell is infinitely more flexible and configurable… so I just quit using it and finally deleted it.

I actually found Butler more useful, but finally it wasn’t doing anything I actually needed, except providing a few keyboard macros that I could really live without. So away it went.