Triggers are pre-defined Quicksilver commands invoked in a variety of ways, most commonly using a keyboard shortcut. Triggers respond to global events and are not restricted to Quicksilver or any other application. Triggers may be used to open your favorite applications, open specific files or URLs, run scripts, control iTunes and more. They are meant to make performing frequent tasks easier by eliminating the need to switch to the application and perform the task manually.

In order to have Triggers appear in the Preferences pane, “Advanced Features” must be enabled. Relaunching Quicksilver is then required.

Once a trigger has been created it will remain active until you disable it, delete it, or quit Quicksilver. Activating triggers is accomplished differently depending on the type of trigger. See keyboard triggers and mouse triggers for more information. The important thing to remember is that triggers do not require a specific application to be active. Using triggers to control iTunes does not require iTunes to be active or even visible. Triggers are still a beta feature, and require that advanced features are set to beta.

Defining triggers is done through the trigger preferences pane in Quicksilver's preferences. Triggers are stored between launches of Quicksilver.

• iTunes: Play/Pause
  1. Make sure you have the iTunes plug-in
  2. Add a new trigger and search for playpause
  3. Use the Run action on the Play-Pause object
• iTunes: Search
  1. Make sure you have the iTunes plug-in
  2. Add a new trigger and search for itunes, right arrow into it, then choose the object to search
  3. Use the Search Contents action on the chosen object
• Launch Safari
  1. Add a new trigger and search for safari
  2. Use the Launch action on the Safari application (Reopen may show up instead if Safari is already open)
• Rebuild Locate Database
  1. Make sure you have the terminal plug-in
  2. Add a new trigger and press . or ' to enter text mode
  3. Use the Run Command in Shell or Run a Text Command in Terminal on this text: sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb