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:
- Turn off the Start at login option in QS’s preferences.
- Paste the text below into a new plain text file in TextEdit.
- Save the file in ~/Library/LaunchAgents with a name like “QuicksilverStartAtLogin.plist”
- 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
