A few years ago, Merlin Mann wrote up this great tutorial on how to append a string to a text file from anywhere, a topic which was mentioned again a little later. Quicksilver’s come a long way since then, and many of the limitations present back then no longer apply. Throw in some Proxy Objects, and you’ve got yourself a really big time-saver that can apply to your global workflow.

Quicksilver is a ubiquitous application. Everyone knows about it, and most people use it to bolster their productivity. The application is able to catalog portions of your hard drive to give you instant access to your documents and software. Various plugins extend Quicksilver’s functionality and add more actions (such as calculations, dictionary lookups or scaling images) as well as allow it to index a wider range of files. This system is so powerful, that in two keystrokes it is possible to locate almost any file buried in your hard drive, and two more to perform an action on it such as deleting, renaming, etc. However, due to limited documentation and the application only being a Beta release, writing a plugin remains a mystery to most developers. This article aims to illustrate the steps needed in order to write a working Quicksilver plugin in Xcode and Objective-C. (Python programmers may use PyObjC).