LoveQuicksilver - Quicksilver Blog
Creating Custom Catalog Entries to Rename Items
Today, we received a tweet from a Quicksilver user asking:
The Tweet
@LoveQuicksilver can you help me? I want “M” to default to Sparrow.app - my mail app without changing the name of Sparrow.
One feature of Quicksilver is that you can only search for letters in a name, so the user’s problem here is that there is no ‘M’ in the word ‘Sparrow’, so it was not possible to find it.
The Failed Solution
After a quick Twitter exchange, I’d come up with a couple of suggestions. One being to create a trigger with the letter ‘M’. This definitely isn’t the best solution. Clearly habits had got the best of this one user so he wanted a way of typing ‘M’ in Quicksilver’s search pane and getting Sparrow.
Surely it’s possible with Quicksilver, no?
The Brain Wave
After some brain storming, the idea of custom catalogs came to me. Custom Catalog Entries can contain any file or ‘object’ that you want, with the benefit of you being able to name them however you like.
The Custom Catalog Entry
First, head into the Catalog Preference Pane and create a new ‘File & Folder Scanner’ catalog entry:
Creating a File & Folder Scanner custom catalog entry
The next steps are fairly self explanatory. Find Sparrow.app from the file browser that pops up, and click ‘Open’. Next, the catalog entry’s sidebar should pop out:
Out pops the sidebar!
We only want to include ‘Sparrow.app’ in this entry, and none of its contents (‘Sparrow.app’ is actually a folder pretending to be a file - called a package), so we can leave this first pane as is. What we want to do is change the Catalog Entry’s name to include the letter ‘M’. By heading over to the ‘Attributes’ tab, this is possible:
Rename the catalog entry to whatever you want
With this done, it’s just a matter of reloading Quicksilver’s catalog (⌘R from within the Quicksilver interface) and getting Quicksilver to learn your new preference:
Assigning the catalog entry to whatever abbreviation you likeHey, presto! Renaming items in Quicksilver without actually renaming them!
