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.

What are your must-have applications? Here’s a list of mine.

TextMate

Macromates’ superb script-driven text editor for Mac OS X. I use this mainly on PHP files for work, but I also use it for blog posts (like this one), as its built-in support for HTML Tidy, and the very handy ‘lookup selection on Google and link’ macro are incredible timesavers. Also, the mate command-line tool is extremely handy, especially since you can pipe other things into it (like curl downloads).

Fugu

An excellent Mac OS X front-end for OpenSSH’s sftp client. Supports TextMate and various other external editors.

curl

Need a file from the web? Forget ‘download managers’ – curl has your back (though wget is also very good for recursive downloads). I use it extensively to grab XML files from our repositories at work – and pass them to other things, all on the command line. Also useful with the curl -I URL command, to check broken headers. Available for every platform under the sun, too.

Safari

Still the best browser for the Mac. Gotta have AcidSearch and SafariStand though.

Vienna

An excellent Mac OS X open-source RSS/Atom syndication client. Loads faster than anything else. And plus, I helped to write the MarsEdit AppleScript for it.

EyeTV

My TV, video recorder, and source of endless numbers of movies to watch!

Note: This was originally posted on an older revision of this blog hosted somewhere else, so it doesn’t make sense in its current context. Just here for completeness.

This weblog is now enabled for Safari-powered blue squidgy address bar RSS button goodness!

Forbes Poll : Which Company Makes The Best Personal Computers?:

IBM introduced the original personal computer back in 1981. Three years later, Lenovo Group brought the first PCs to China. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and a PC revolution has occurred. Computers are as commonplace as TV sets in households worldwide, and Lenovo is buying IBM’s PC division for $1.75 billion. Yet now there is a plethora of PC manufacturers from which to choose–not to mention Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ), whose Macintosh computers are often touted as being anti-PC. One fierce competitor is industry leader Dell (nasdaq: DELL – news – people ), which yesterday announced record-setting fourth-quarter sales. So we ask you, who makes the best personal computers?

Get out and vote, chapettes and chaps! It’s your DUTY!

(Via Sen No Sen.)

Currently playing in iTunes: Radio Paradise – eclectic intelligent rock – music info & listener community at radioparadise.com

Well, I am rather pleased with myself at the moment as I just got the Fink Project’s distribution of GNOME running on my Mac.

It looks really promising so far. I’m using Apple’s X11.app implementation just now but as far as I can see you can also use the Xdarwin X11 system or compile your own (should you be a sadomasochist). GNOME is a bit flaky in terms of error handling when running apps from the the Terminal, but I suppose you can’t expect it to be perfect.

GNOME has always bugged me in one small, but eternally annoying way: text sizes are incredibly variable between programs and different user interface elements. Maybe it uses a different DPI setting for certain things, but it’s rather irritating when you need to go back to the Gnome Control Center and change your application text size because the app you’ve just launched is barely readable. Perhaps there’s a command-line switch to set it before the app launches, but as the installed GNOME executables don’t have man pages, it’s impossible to tell. If anyone can enlighten me, please do.

Ramblings on server-admin

It would be great if Apple would come up with some way to log in to a Mac remotely using a graphical interface. I know that you can use VNC, Timbuktu or Apple Remote Desktop but they’re hardly the most bandwidth-efficient solutions: they are effectively streaming video servers. I know that the Mac OS X window manager (the Quartz display manager/rendering system) is far removed from Xwindows but it would be really nice if there were some way to pipe graphics instructions, rather than the resulting images, over to another system, Xwindows-style.