Getting Quicksilver to Launch at Startup on OSX Lion with a SSD

No Mac setup is complete without Quicksilver. If you’ve never heard of or used it before, I urge you to give it a try. It’s a lightning fast app launcher that’ll really increase your speed/productivity by reducing the amount of clicks/searching/typing you need to do to perform a task.

I digress; I recently installed a fresh version of OSX Lion on my machine and one of the first apps I installed was QS. However I quickly noticed that the Start at Login function wasn’t working very well –see not at all.

Symptoms:

• QS logo appears at startup, but never completely fades out
• The QS hotkey (CTRL+space) works and brings up the prompt but any subsequent keystroke is ignored

After a bit of searching I found the solution from Jon Stovell on the blacktree-quicksilver google group. It seems to affect OSX Lion setups and in particular machines using Solid State Drives or in my case a Solid State Hybrid Drive.

For completeness sake, here is the solution:

1. Turn off the Start at login option in QS’s preferences.
2. Paste the text below into a new plain text file in TextEdit.
3. Save the file in ~/Library/LaunchAgents with a name like “QuicksilverStartAtLogin.plist”
4. QS will now automatically start on next login

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> 
<plist version="1.0"> 
<dict> 
  <key>Label</key> 
  <string>QuicksilverStartAtLogin</string> 
  <key>ProgramArguments</key> 
  <array> 
    <string>/Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver</string> 
  </array> 
  <key>RunAtLoad</key> 
  <true/> 
</dict> 
</plist>

Optionally, you can replace <key>RunAtLoad</key> with <key>KeepAlive</key> if you want QS to restart automatically if it ever crashes.

Happy QS’ing