New Quicksilver Won't Go to Websites

[A. Sharp]

When I was running the Yosemite operating system in my Mac, I could use Quicksilver to go instantly to a website by clicking just the first one or two or at most three letters. W took me to the Washington Post site, CNN took me to CNN, etc.

When I upgraded to El Capitan, Quicksilver no longer had that function. It only takes me to apps within Apple - Mail, Messages, iTunes, etc.

I just installed the new update of Quicksilver but I still can't get it to take me to websites. The reviews all say it's better than Spotlight but there are now lots of things I can do with Spotlight that Quicksilver won't do.

Can anyone help me with this?

Thank you.

[Rob McBroom]

On 14 Sep 2016, at 15:16, A. Sharp wrote:

> When I was running the Yosemite operating system in my Mac, I could
> use
> Quicksilver to go instantly to a website by clicking just the first
> one or
> two or at most three letters. W took me to the Washington Post site,
> CNN
> took me to CNN, etc.
>
> When I upgraded to El Capitan, Quicksilver no longer had that
> function. It
> only takes me to apps within Apple - Mail, Messages, iTunes, etc.

It sounds like the URLs just aren’t in your Quicksilver catalog any
more. If you’re using Safari, they changed the way bookmarks are
stored when Yosemite was released. If you still had the old property
list version laying around, Quicksilver would continue indexing that. If
you did a clean upgrade and don’t have all your old files, that would
explain why it quit working.

Does that sound like it could explain the problem?

There are a billion other ways to get the URLs you care about into
Quicksilver, but obviously the Safari plug-in needs to be fixed.

> I just installed the new update of Quicksilver but I still can't get
> it to
> take me to websites. The reviews all say it's better than Spotlight
> but
> there are now lots of things I can do with Spotlight that Quicksilver
> won't
> do.

It depends on what you want to do, I guess. If you’re searching for a
file based on its contents, use Spotlight. Quicksilver is better for
everything else.

--
Rob McBroom
http://www.skurfer.com/

[Rob McBroom]

On 14 Sep 2016, at 17:02, Rob McBroom wrote:

> If you’re using Safari, they changed the way bookmarks are stored
> when Yosemite was released.

Scratch that. They changed history. Bookmarks should still be working.

So let me back up…

How are you adding the URLs to Quicksilver in the first place? Can you
see them under Preferences → Catalog?

[A. Sharp]

Thank you so much for replying. I don't remember ever adding URLs to Quicksilver before. When I look at the catalogue, I see three folders - applications, find all applications, applications (user) - and something that's not a folder called "running applications and processes." How do I add URLs? I was hoping that upgrading to 1.4.2 was going to fix the problem but it's still the same.

[Rob McBroom]

On 14 Sep 2016, at 21:40, A. Sharp wrote:

I don't remember ever adding URLs to Quicksilver before. When I look at the catalogue, I see three folders - applications, find all applications, applications (user) - and something that's not a folder called "running applications and processes."

Those are the things under the “Applications” section of the catalog. If you look down the left side, there are a few others.

How do I add URLs? I was hoping that upgrading to 1.4.2 was going to fix the problem but it's still the same.

Like I said, there are a lot of ways to accomplish that.

One common way is to add the bookmarks from your preferred browser. (All of the big ones are supported.)

First, go to Preferences → Plugins and make sure you have the plug-in for your browser. (You might want to restart QS after installing new plug-ins, even if it doesn’t ask.)

Then go to Preferences → Catalog and choose Plugins on the left. Find the entries related to your browser and make sure the “Bookmarks” entry is enabled. (It usually is by default.) If so, all of your bookmarks should be available to search from the main QS interface.

Other possible ways to add URLs:

• From Pinboard using the Social Bookmarks plug-in
• From your web browser history
• Add links to an HTML file and create a custom catalog entry to scan it
• List URLs in a text file and create a custom catalog entry to scan it

I won’t go into detail, since those are less common.

When the URLs are first scanned, you may need to type a few extra characters to find them, but QS will learn pretty quickly, so you can get back down to one or two keystrokes to find what you want. You can speed this process up with the “Assign Abbreviation…” action.