goodbye, Quicksilver, and thanks for all the fish

For years, I’ve been using something called Quicksilver as one of the ways I control my Mac. It lets me pop up a little control window to do various things. But last week my bike got stolen, which meant I ended up upgrading to the latest version of the OS so I could share the location of its AirTag with the cops. It didn’t get found, sadly; the airtag’s been sitting a block away from what I am told is a notorious chop shop under the I-10.

Not too many things broke in this upgrade, but Quicksilver did – its windows are now showing up at the top left of the screen, instead of the center; a lot of searches are just not working any more, and half the hotkeys it provides are broken. Which is important when a couple of them are calling scripts that do things in Illustrator as part of my regular workflow. 

I was putting off dealing with this, but today I looked at Quicksilver’s ‘about’ got this. And that just doesn’t feel promising for having it get upgraded, y’know?

So I just spent an hour or two figuring out how to get Alfred to do the things I had Quicksilver doing.

I am gonna miss Quicksilver’s “noun,verb” two-panel interface. I’ve been using it for about two decades and I don’t have to think about it any more.

Eventually I will get used to Alfred’s “one search bar” mode. Eventually. I’ve got my shortcuts for Illustrator wired up again, as well as the ones to bring iTunes up and to skip to the next album, and I’ve configured it with the same colors I had for Quicksilver, so I’m mostly good.

I dunno. I’ve been using Quicksilver for two decades now. Feels weird to be switching.

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