Quicksilver Discovery: Mouse Dragged Object Triggers!

The thing I love about Quicksilver is that it never stops amazing you with the things it can do. So many times I’m using Quicksilver and I wonder, “wouldn’t it be cool if Quicksilver could do x?” and find that it’s way ahead of me and it can. It was in this way that I discovered the drag and drop abilities well featured in TAB screencast here, which has transformed the way I move files around, especially when attaching things to emails. (QS to it, and drag it into the mail, what could be easier?).

Today’s blog concerns such a discovery. While horribly mistyping the word google (don’t ask me how) I stumbled across a proxy object I had never seen before:

At first I thought to myself, what good is this? But than I realized a wealth of possibilities in trigger creation. Imagine, anything that you frequently do to, well, anything that you can drag, you can make into a trigger that requires you to simply drag it to some corner of your screen! To find out how to do this, read on.

Side note: I know that there are many QS cultists on the world wide web that consider QS to be the death of the mouse. I’ll admit that I am not the greatest fan of mousing, but I do not think that QS makes us more efficient by replacing mouse clicks with keystrokes, I believe it makes us more efficient by allowing us to chose when we change modes. I’ll have more to say on this when I post my writeup on the uses for Constellation menus in a few weeks/years. (given my stellar posting record)

On to the creation of a Trigger with the Mouse Trigger Dragged Object. For this demo I’ll be making a Trigger that allows me to email a file/string to anyone by dragging the object into the upper left corner of my screen.

Step 1: Create the Trigger
To create our trigger will invoke QS and hit Command-’, which takes us to the Triggers section of QS preferences.

We’ll chose a Mouse Trigger (which requires the mouse trigger plugin) for our quick-email trigger, otherwise it won’t work!

In the Primer-like three pane trigger step up we find our Mouse Dragged Trigger Object. (this is a proxy object, make sure proxy objects are enabled in your catalog in the Quicksilver section.)

Next we tab to the action pane and type Email, to get the Email (Compose) action.

That’s odd, Email isn’t available? Are we out of luck?

Step 1-retry
The reason our trigger doesn’t work is because there is nothing in the Mouse Dragged Trigger Object proxy when we make the trigger, at least nothing that QS thinks you can email. There is a way around this.

We invoke Quicksilver on something that can be emailed. Any file or string will do. We then tab to the action pane to get our desired action: Email (Compose)… in this case.

With our focus in the action pane, we hit Command-C (as in copy). Yes, you can copy actions, trippy eh?

Step 2 – Finish the trigger
We go back to the trigger pane and back to our Mouse Dragged Trigger Object trigger.

Tabbing to action pane, we hit Command-V. Poof, Email (Compose)… is where it should be.

We leave the third pane blank and un-tabbed to so that when the trigger invokes it gives us the opportunity to specify to whom the file will be emailed.

Step 3 – Setting up the Mouse action that will trigger it
Our last step is to configure the mouse action that will trigger this trigger. (he he, trigger)

For the type, we want Drag and Drop. Drag Entered will work, but it will invoke and then disappear if you drag and drop. Drag and Drop works every time.

Next we chose a screen corner/side. I chose my upper left hand corner.

Finally, we have the option of specifying a modifier key. I chose this so that I don’t accidentally trigger the action when spastically mousing around. This also allows us to re-use space. If you want to get crazy, you could assign many triggers to the same corner, each using a different set of modifier keys. (points to some math-nerd who tells me how many)

All Done
That’s it! Our mouse dragged object trigger should work now. So the next time you’re browsing the web with your mouse and you run into some passage that you want to email someone, select it and Command-Drag it to the corner. Mouse-browsing the Finder and find the file you want to send to Jimbo. You could Command-esc it, but maybe it suits your flow to drag it up there before switching to keyboard mode.

Well I hope the tutorial was helpful and relatively free of errors. I’ll try to update more often in the future. This is especially true if I notice any readers.