Goodbye QuickSilvεr, Hello Google Quick Search + Proxi + Growl!
I’ve been a fan of QuickSilvεr for years. It’s played a significant role in my life on OS X and I’ve gotten to know and love most of its quirks, crashes, and instabilities. But no more! I’ve found a new love and I’m kicking you out, you beautiful fiend.
My new love is a trio of programs: Google Quick Search Box, Proxi, and Growl. Everyone knows how cool Growl is and probably has it installed, but Google Quick Search and Proxi might be new to some folks. I’ll go through the changes I’ve made in moving from Quicksilvεr to my new trio.
Quicksilvεr is cool
If you’re a QS user like me, what attracted you to QS in the first place was the elegance and the economy. With as few keystrokes as you could want, you can accomplish common, useful things. And QS just makes your Mac feel really cool, even when it’s starting up:
But we need a little something new every once in a while.
Quicksilvεr’s slow demise
Even the hardiest fans of Quicksilvεr must admit that it’s suffered greatly in author Nicholas Jitkoff’s absence. It hasn’t had a significant update for months; the last stable release was at the end of 2007. It has some memory corruption problems that manifest themselves by the icons disappearing and the triggers stop working after about a week. I haven’t minded restarting QS, knowing that this is the price to pay for such useful software, but recently I started wondering if there wasn’t anything else out there yet.
I tried Google’s Quick Search Box for OS X last year (also written by
Nicholas Jitkoff, who is now a Google employee), but it wasn’t ready
for prime time. I’d also used Proxi off and on for trigger-related
events that I couldn’t get to work in Quicksilvεr, but it also seemed
to get wedged occasionally (note: Proxi still hangs occasionally after
closing iTunes), remedied only by a kill or waiting a while.
But with the latest releases of GQSB (2.0.0.1147) and Proxi (1.5), I think I’ve found the perfect combination for what I used to do in QS.
If you haven’t yet, go get a copy of Google Quick Search Box (GQSB) and Proxi and install them. We’ll look at GQSB first.
Google Quick Search Box
Here’s how I set mine up. I’m an emacs user, so I can never have
^-Space for my launch trigger. If you don’t use emacs, you might enjoy
a little more pinky room there. In any case, once I turned off
Quicksilvεr, I had my old ⌥-Space keystroke freed up for GQSB. Let’s
look at the first preference page:
I turned off the ⌘+⌘ key trigger after an hour; I’d already found that I accidentally seem to hit that key combo a little too often.
Here’s the second pane:
I’m a bit of a privacy freak, so I turned off the Google searches. With these enabled, this little tool becomes a little too powerful for me. It’s kind of scary, but for the fearless, you’re going to flip out at how slick this is.
In the “Under the Hood” section, change these to suit your tastes. I’m sure I’ll continue tweaking these for a while (scroll down if you only see one option):
Now we’ve got a new search/launch tool installed! However, if you’re like me, you’ve added a lot of triggers and AppleScripts to QS and really miss the shortcuts. It’s important to bear in mind that GQSB is only a search tool and launcher; it doesn’t have triggers like Quicksilvεr does. For those we now introduce Proxi.
Proxi
Proxi definitely took its cue from Quicksilvεr when it came to superfluous effects:
Proxi is obviously a self-serving bit of software for Griffin Technology, which hasn’t fully been able to engage the larger development community behind it. Fortunately, they’ve put enough useful general-purpose, non-Griffin functionality in it to make a truly useful tool.
Proxi is a really only a trigger manager at heart, but it does a decent job of it. Here we’re going to take an old trigger from our Quicksilvεr setup and do the same thing in Proxi. Here’s the trigger in Quicksilvεr:
This trigger launches an AppleScript, that launches Stick ‘Em Up, my favorite sticky program by Jim McGowan.
Now open the Proxi Editor by clicking the gear icon in your menu bar:
And make a new trigger:
I’m going to call it “run stick ‘em’ up”. When you select the new trigger in the left panel, on the far right panel you’ll see the settings for this new trigger. Here is where you assign the hotkeys. I’m using ⌘⌥^-S in this case:
Now we add a new task to this trigger. You can add multiple tasks to a trigger if you want:
One excellent thing Proxi can do is to run Applescripts inline. Here we make a launcher for an application:
That’s all! Just close the Proxi Editor and it’s running.
Proxi still suffers from some lag occasionally; I haven’t found any kind of consistent pattern to it, but by and large I haven’t had much trouble with the latest 1.5 update.
Fin
Between Proxi for the common hotkey shortcuts and Google Quick Search Box for the blazing fast hard-drive searches (and I use Growl to listen for iTunes track changes, just like Quicksilvεr used to do for me), I’m back in the saddle in under an hour.
posted on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 at 12:59 | permanent link | view comments
I was trying to eject a disk image the other day and got this error:
$ hdiutil detach /Volumes/disk1
hdiutil: couldn't unmount "disk1" - error 49153
Error 49153 isn’t very useful, but I assumed it means “you can’t eject this disk image because you’re still working on it” or something like that. I opened up a terminal and ran ‘lsof’ (LiSt Open Files):
$ lsof | grep /Volumes/disk1
bash 5460 scott cwd DIR 14,5 2346 21 /Volumes/disk1/file.txt
Ah, ‘bash’ is the default OS X shell, so I must have another shell somewhere (I did). Once I closed the terminal window (I had been editing files on the disk in it), I was able to unmount the disk image.
osx2x - control a remote X server from OS X
I use a FreeBSD 5 desktop at work next to my Powerbook (running OS X). Sometimes I wanted to share something between the two computers, but was limited to saving whatever it was as a file and scp’ing the file to and fro. Yuk.
Anyway, I finally stopped being lazy and started looking for what I knew had to be out there: a way to share a mouse and keyboard between OS X and a normal X installation.
I found a few options. A popular one is called ‘Synergy’. I avoided it because it seemed “big” to me, and an X client shouldn’t be big. I also didn’t want to run this on “just anything”: I had a specific purpose (OS X controlling a FreeBSD X setup).
In the end, I tried osx2x, which I’ve been delighted with. It’s small and fast and really easy to use. All I had to do was make sure I added my Powerbook’s hostname to the FreeBSD X’s xhost acl:
xhost +mypowerbook
Now I fire up osx2x, click ‘New Connection’:
The menu appears, into which I type my hostname, and which edge of the screen I want to trigger the switch to the desktop:
Now each time I startup osx2x, I have my connection already setup:
There’s even a preference to hide osx2x when I’m on my own desktop and show it when my mouse is on the “other” desktop (for those times when I forget where I left my mouse cursor):
Very elegant, and it works great. Apparently it works on VNC setups too (i.e., you can connect to a Windows machine running VNC in the same way). I haven’t tried that yet, but might soon.
Highly recommended for those who use dual machines.