Leaf Raker

I’m not using an Apple-keyboard when working on my desk with my MacBook Pro, which creates a number of small but not serious annoyances. One of those annoyances are the reversed Command- and Option keys, another one is the missing “Eject” button.

So I tried to figure out how to eject CDs and DVDs from my MacBook Pro using Quicksilver. What I discovered was something that probably a lot of users know, but I didn’t . So I thought I’ll share it here:

If you don’t have an “Eject” button on your keyboard you can just press and hold the “F12″ key for two seconds and you CD/DVD will be ejected!
(Small disclaimer: I think you need at least Mac OS 10.2 for this to work!)

It’s that simple, no need for some fancy Quicksilver action. Sometimes life is just so much easier than expected.

A Quicksilver trigger is a convenient way to define a global shortcut, accessible no matter which application is currently active or the frontmost.

There are two kinds of triggers: Keyboard and Mouse triggers. The mouse trigger is very similar to the keyboard trigger, only that you click a mouse button along with some function keys instead of just a key.

Here is how to create a trigger in Quicksilver to do something very basic, for example launch Apples “Mail” application:

First select “Triggers” from the Quicksilver menu in your toolbar at the top of your screen:

In the dialog that appears Click on the little plus-sign at the bottom and select “HotKey” for a keyboard trigger or “Mouse” for a mouse trigger. In my example I am selecting “HotKey” for a keyboard trigger:

Quicksilver will show a dialog very similar to the normal Quicksilver interface. Define the trigger exactly the same way you would ususally use Quicksilver to do something. So in this example I select “Mail” as item and “Open” as the action:

You should now have a new trigger to open the mail application, so the only thing left is to define which key combination will invoke the trigger. To do that select your new trigger and click the little “i”-button at the bottom right of the dialog:

A drawer will open with the details of the trigger:

Click on the “Edit” button for the hot key. Enter the key combination you would like to use for the trigger.

I always use the combination “Shift-Control-Command” along with a defining key for all my Quicksilver triggers. This key combination may feel odd at first, but it didn’t take long for me to get used to it. The advantage of this combination is that it only very seldom causes any conflict with keyboard shortcuts in other applications.

This concludes the creation of a keyboard trigger. Mouse triggers are created similar, only that the drawer to define the Hot Key looks a bit different to cater for the options you have when using a mouse.

Merlin Mann, author of the famous 43 folders site, posted a video where the author of Quicksilver (A1c0r) talks about why he wrote Quicksilver the way he did:

43 Folders: Quicksilver demo by Nicholas Jitkoff

It’s a must-see for every Quicksilver fan!

Ways to quickly launch the screen saver are useful, esspecially in an environment where one want to lock the machine when stepping away from the desk.

The probably most common way is to define a “Hot Corner” (under System Preferences -> Desktop & Screensaver -> Screen Saver -> Hot Corners) to launch the screen saver. After doing so a quick move of the mouse into the specified corner will engage the screen saver.

My problem with this method is that I rarely use the track pad on my Mac Book Pro, so decided to use a Quicksilver keyboard trigger to engage the screen saver.

First Step: How can we launch the screen saver with Quicksilver? All we need to do is open the Screen Saver Engine, which is located here:

Therefore, we launch Quicksilver, enter Text Mode by typing a period and enter the path to the engine. Quicksilver should look something like this:

The only thing left to do is to define a keyboard trigger. I’m using “Shift/Control/Command-L” as my trigger.

This key combination may sound a bit awkward at first, but I’m using “Shift/Control/Command” for all my Quicksilver trigger. The nice thing about this combination is that it rarely cause conflicts with other keyboard shortcuts, and once you are used to this combination it’s really not this bad. So in this case I combined it with the letter “L”, for “Lock”.

Nocturne, a nifty little application from the creator of Quicksilver, let’s you switch the display of your Mac into night vision mode:

This “night vision mode” is more than just a toy – there are situations when it comes in very handy! I like to use it in meetings and presentations where the light in the room are dimmed down. In those situations, the “night vision display” makes the display more comfortable for my eyes and reduces the annoyance of the bright laptop display for other people in the room.

The only drawback to Nocturne is that (to my knowledge) it doesn’t have an easy way to toggle between night vision and normal display with Quicksilver – so here is my solution:

Once Nocturne is set to “night vision” it will remember this setting and switch the display immediately when invoked. So all I needed was an application that would start Nocturne if it’s not running and quit Nocturne otherwise. A short apple script does this job for me:

You can download this script here: toggleNocturne

That’s it. Save this script as an application and define a keyboard trigger in Quicksilver (I used Shift-Control-Command-N) to invoke it.