QuicKeys X3
As regular readers will know, I’m something a rather fanatical user of an application called Quicksilver. I use it every day to access files, addresses and play MP3 files, launch applications, do quick calculations and look up the definition of words. However, there are things that even the mighty Quicksilver can’t do easily, and in my quest to automate all of the irritating repetitive tasks that we end up doing on our computers, I turned to QuicKeys. In fact, I’ve had various versions of QuicKeys around since version 1, but I stopped using it at some point. At the time, I was using it mainly to launch files and folders, but Quicksilver provided a much more flexible and elegant way to accomplish that.
With the latest versions, I’ve started to use it in earnest again for tasks like switching network locations, SMTP servers and even replacing or adding to keyboard shortcuts. I know that in Panther you can edit the keyboard shortcuts for any application via the System Preferences, but in my experience it is clunky and only works when it feels like it. Using QuicKeys is easier and more reliable, and you can even add shortcuts for actions which would usually be done using the mouse. For example, I’m currently trying out Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client. It’s excellent in many ways, but there are no keyboard shortcuts for selecting the inbox, sent mail box or the junk mail box, for example. Using mouse click recording, I was able to set up keyboard shortcuts to simulate clicking on a mailbox in the mailbox list. I’ve also got little macros to do things like exchange two adjacent characters. Cocoa applications have a shortcut for this (Control-T, I think), but now that I have a QuicKeys shortcut bound to Control-T, I can get the same behaviour in all applications.
