Reader Tip: Easily Relaunch Quicksilver
Regular reader/commenter/fellow Quicksilver guru Jono emailed this great tip for Quicksilver. If you’re a regular user of Quicksilver – especially with the advanced features enabled – you know it can act up from time to time. And while Quicksilver can be used to Force Quit or Relaunch other applications, it’s like trying to tickle yourself, it just doesn’t work.
Regular Reader/Commender Jono, submitted this tip about creating an Automator action that will Force Quit and then Relaunch Quicksilver on your command. To create it for yourself, do the following:
Create a new Automator workflow
Add the ‘Run AppleScript’ action
In there type:
do shell script “killall Quicksilver”
do shell script “open /Applications/Quicksilver.app”
Now, I saved it as a Finder plugin so that I can right-click (that’s CTRL click for you single-button mouse users) anywhere and choose RQ (Relaunch Quicksilver) action. Works mighty well – Thanks Jono!
hmelman on June 25th, 2007 at 10:47 am
If QS isn’t hung (requiring a force quit) but is merely acting up you can easily restart it by activating it (control-space or whatever you’ve set it to) and typing control-command-Q.
Elan on June 25th, 2007 at 10:58 am
I kill my quicksilver every night in the middle of the night with a simple script run by cron:
#!/bin/sh
killall Quicksilver; sleep 1; open /Programs/Quicksilver.app
I haven’t had any problems since.
Jeremy Brooks on June 25th, 2007 at 11:04 am
If Quicksilver is not running, the killall will return non-zero and the script will fail. I did this to ensure a zero exit value:
do shell script “killall Quicksilver; exit 0″
do shell script “open /Applications/Quicksilver.app”
Darth Zippy on June 25th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Or, you could cut out the middle-man and use the ‘Do Shell Command’ Automator action instead of the Appliscript action.
Either way, nice tip :)
alex on June 26th, 2007 at 4:31 am
this goes in the bash.login file in ~/
alias rquicksilver=”killall Quicksilver; open /Applications/Utilities/Quicksilver.app”
Jono on June 26th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Yea, I should point out that this is meant for force quitting & restarting Quicksilver when it misbehaves. Not just normal quitting or starting of Quicksilver.
Also I didn’t come up with the AppleScript, someone much cleverer than me at the Quicksilver forums did. I just had the idea of using Automator to er… automate it.