Quicksilver has many uses. It’s the all-powerful grammatical navigation and manipulation utility for Mac OS X.
A nice trick is to allow you to run shell commands from within the QS window. You can do this in text mode (hit ‘ and type your commands, then select “Run A Text Command in Terminal”).
But you can also get access to any of your command-line utilities in a different way – by adding their directories to the QS catalogue.
Normally you can’t add ‘invisible’ folders to your custom catalogue (through the + icon in the Custom screen of the Catalogue), but QS lets you drag invisible folders into the Catalogue window directly.
So, if you want a quick vim window, add /usr/bin to your Catalogue, and you’ll be able to enter QS, hit ‘vi’, tab and select ‘Run in Terminal’. Note that ‘Run as Shell Script’ will fail in most cases unless it’s a command that exits cleanly.