The Command Window provides a quick and unobtrusive interface for working with files and the data they contain. However, Quicksilver is extremely flexible so there are multiple ways to achieve the same goal. In the Command Window section, the kinds of tasks you do every day while working on your Macintosh will be discussed, and ways in which the Command Window can be used to accomplish those tasks more efficiently will be suggested. You'll be amazed how much time and effort you can save.

The Command Window section is focused on what you can do with the Command Window. If you want to understand how Quicksilver works in more general terms, or learn what the interface items do, then read the section on Menus.

Before going any deeper into what you can do with the Command Window, you need to understand how to pass items to it, and perform actions on those items.

Regardless of which interface style you've chosen (see Command Preferences), the structure of the Command Window system is the same. It might help to think of this structure as being similar to grammar or syntax in a language; you select an item, then tell the Command Window what to do with that item. The first item you choose is the object (where you, the doer, are the subject) of the sentence, the action you choose as the second item is the verb acting on the object, and with some actions you might be able to modify the action with a third item (an adverb phrase).

For example (see the screenshot below), you might select a text file called memo.txt by typing mem (note that the abbreviations used here are just examples - the ones you need will depend upon the contents of your hard drive). By default, the action in the next field will be Open. If you hit Return or Enter now, it will open the file memo.txt in the default application for that file type. But you might want to open the file with another application: instead of opening the file with the default TextEdit, you might prefer to use BBEdit. Hit the Tab key to select the second field, then type ow to change the action to Open With. Another field now opens, as more information is needed to process the action. Hitting the Tab key again selects the third field, where you type bbe to find BBEdit. Finally, hit Return or Enter to open memo.txt in BBEdit.

The meaning of the syntax in this example is “Open memo.txt with BBEdit”. Easy, isn't it? If you wanted to accomplish the same task in the traditional way, you would have to dig around in Finder to locate memo.txt, then either drag the file onto the BBEdit icon, or use the Control-click contextual menu to find BBEdit under the 'Open With…' sub-menu.

Multiple files can easily be selected at once using the , (comma) key. This adds a small version of the icon to the bottom of the window denoting that the file has been selected. You can continue to browse and add more files, then proceed to performing an action on them as usual.

For some commands (for example web searching) you need to enter literal text rather than have the Command Window interpret the characters you enter as a search. To enter text mode:

• type ” or ' or . (period), then type the text you want to enter.
• type a character sequence that cannot be matched in the catalog. Quicksilver assumes a literal text string….