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Quicksilver Screencast: Abracadabra Gestures & Triggers

Written on February 02, 2007 by Nick Santilli and 15 people have commented

This week I’m covering the Abracadabra plugin for Quicksilver. It brings you the ability to create Triggers in Quicksilver, which can be activated by mouse gestures, rather than the stale, last century keystroke. Ok, so there’s nothing really wrong with Keystrokes, just sensationalizing…

Quicksilver

So go ahead and check out the screencast. It should hold all the answers you’re in need of. If now, please leave questions in the comments below.

Quicksilver with Abracadabra Triggers Screencast
It’s about 4 minutes long and 19mb in size.

And when you’re through with the screencast, you may be interested in checking out this cool (read: nerdy) hack…which I of course have tried. Basically it details how to take a Gyro mouse and pair it with Quicksilver and Abracadabra to create a magic wand. Nerderific!

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  1. #1 Loshem says:

    I was wondering something about your desktop. How did you get you HD to look like that? also what is that robot looking icon on your top bar? Awesome vid, it helped me out a lot.

    Losh

  2. #2 Nick Santilli says:

    All I can say about the icon is that it’s from Big Robot Software - They’ve also got a nice little app called Meta you might want to check out. (I’ll be writing some about it in the future.)

    As for the wood HD icon, you can find out more about it from this post here on TAB.

  3. #3 Anil says:

    It maybe a very naive silly question though…
    In QuickSilver plugins window
    i do not see any abracadabra option for me to check (at the same place as shown in video)

    can someone tell me how to find it..
    and thank you very much for the screenshot..
    it is really magic!!!

  4. #4 Rolf says:

    @Anil: Please check if “All Plugins” on the left is selected. Then “Abracadabra Triggers (b)” should appear on the right. Even simpler you can type “abra” in the search-field on the bottom.

  5. #5 Rolf says:

    Again @Anil: You can download it directly from this location:
    http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/plugins/download.php?qsversion=14168&id=com.blacktree.Quicksilver.QSGestureTriggers

    Then drag it onto Quicksilver.app.

  6. #6 luke says:

    It doesn’t appear in my list either, yet strangely it shows up when I search for it!

    bizarre

  7. #7 Anil says:

    @Rolf..the link helped…

  8. #8 Toejam says:

    Ensure that ‘Enable advanced features’ is checked in the Quicksilver ‘Preferences’ panel.

  9. #9 sammy.snickerpi says:

    My Quicksilver is nice, but it is really, really buggy. More times than not, I hit the handy ctrl-space, and nothing happens because Quicksilver has quit. I know it is still in beta, but I was just wondering if it unexpectedly quits for everyone.

  10. #10 Stefan says:

    Hi,

    is it possible to bind an action like closing a window (or command-w) to a gesture?

    Thanks
    Stefan

  11. #11 Austin says:

    You mention in the screencast that you find it difficult to to remember and re-create the triggers with your mouse but have you tried doing this with laptop track pad?
    Within the bounds of the trackpad you can quite easily do:

    “a” for Adobe PS
    “W” for MS Word
    “X” for MS Excel
    “e” for Entourage
    “L” for local host

    The possibilites here are endless; I may never venture into Finder again!!

  12. #12 Colin says:

    Great screencast.

    It is important to remember that where the big dot is in your options pane that’s where your mouse has to start and it has to go in that same direction.

    For instance in Nick’s example he dragged the mouse from the upper right hand corner to the lower left. Dragging it from the lower left to the upper right will not have the same effect.

    Just thought I’d point that out in case anyone was confused.

  13. #13 Adam Kayce : Monk at Work says:

    Very nice; time will tell how much I remember to use it!

    One easy way to remember triggers to launch apps is, like Austin was describing, to use the first letter of each app. So, my common ones:

    C for Camino
    T for Thunderbird
    J for MacJournal
    E for “empty trash”
    a backslash for iTunes

    etc.

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