Extending Quicksilver’s append to file

The Basics

Essentially, the “Append Text” command is used like so:

Alternatively, as with most Quicksilver commands, it can be used by swapping the subject and indirect selectors:

However, this method is very limited. Mainly, it’s just too much effort to navigate to the appropriate file, especially if it’s one that’s been created recently and is yet to achieve a high rank. It’s also a bit of a hassle to have to type the text in. We can easily overcome these using triggers.

Triggers

In Quicksilver’s preference pane is a “Triggers” section. Under that it is possible to create shortcuts for commands that may need to be used regularly. Adding a command to append text to a file is often set up in the following manner.

If you’re wondering, to get the indirect selector remain blank you need to press escape to get out of text-mode, then press Cmd-X to clear the selector.

Proxify

Where the above method fails, is if you’d like to be able to select a string of text and have it append to a file. For that, the use of the Proxy Object “Current Selection” is quite beneficial.

You can use this on text clippings from the Finder, selections from Safari, and most Cocoa applications. A really nifty way to use this feature would be to mimic the global todo service being released in Leopard. Simply add a trigger to append the selected text to a todo.txt file somewhere on your hard drive! I know people are always looking to have the ability to append text from the clipboard into a file. You can do that just as easily:

Further still

Up to this point, all the techniques described have some minor limitations. For instance, if you have multiple files to which you’d like to append text, you’ll need to create individual triggers for each file you have. With some creative thinking, this hurdle can also be overcome. Take a look at the following trigger:

The text comes from the selection, and all you have to do is specify which file you’d like to append to. Now, this is the reverse of the first technique. Instead of specifying only the text, we specify only the file. This is the trigger I personally use at it provides the flexibility to simply select the desired text or clipping and choose any text file to append it to. This is especially useful when taking feature requests for applications or answering support emails, if you don’t have an official system in place.

That’s it

You have just read through the different ways to append text to a file using Quicksilver. If you’re interested, there is also a “Prepend” action that adds text to the start, rather than the end of the selected file. A short summary:

Basic append commands

Text Append To File

File Append Text Text

Basic Trigger

File Append Text Blank (Cmd-x)

Append from selection

Current Selection Append To File

Append from clipboard

Clipboard Contents Append To File

Append from selection, choosing file

Current Selection Append To Blank (Cmd-x)

Was this helpful? Or do you know any other super-time-saving shortcuts and tips?