Since we’ve noticed an ever increasing number of former Quicksilver users who switched over to LaunchBar, we’d like to provide an overview of some of the differences and to answer the most frequently asked questions in this regard.
Often people didn’t realize that pretty much everything you can do with Quicksilver can also be accomplished with LaunchBar, quite often much faster and more reliably, requiring fewer keystrokes.
Yes. Press either Command-Space/Space or Command-R. To learn more about LaunchBar’s app-switcher, see the LaunchBar Help chapter “Application Switching”.
Yes. If you are currently browsing the list of running applications (via Command-Space/Space or Command-R), just press Command-Q to quit the selected application.
Alternatively, if you’ve selected an application by typing an abbreviation, press Tab and select the “Quit Application” action.
And finally, to quit all currently running applications at once you can use LaunchBar’s “Quit All Applications” action.
Yes. Select a file or folder in LaunchBar and use the arrow keys to navigate. Press right arrow to show a folder’s contents, press left arrow to navigate to the parent folder.
Yes, LaunchBar allows you to perform all sorts of file operations. Files can be moved, copied, renamed, you can create aliases, move them to the trash, assign color labels, open the Get Info window and much more.
Yes. LaunchBar’s Services indexing rule automatically adds all commands from the Mac OS X Services menu to your LaunchBar index. To send a selected file or folder to a service, just press Tab and type an abbreviation of the name of the desired service.
Yes, of course. LaunchBar has a customizable set of search templates. Select such a template (e.g. type GOO to select the Google search template, or type WIK to select the Wikipedia template), then press the Space bar and enter your search term.
Select a search template and press Space, or even better, open the search template via Instant Open. For example, assuming you are using the abbreviation “G” to select the Google search template, just press and hold the “G” key.
If you want to perform a web search using a text that’s already selected in another application, you can pass that text to LaunchBar via Instant Send, and then press and hold “G” to perform the search instantly.
Note: Although it’s possible to enter the search term first via “Enter Text” and then press Tab to pass it to a search template, this technique is not recommended since it requires more keystrokes.
You can, but you rarely need to. If you want to enter arbitrary text as an action’s argument (e.g. to perform web searches, run scripts or command-line tools, append text to a file, etc.) you just select the target item first (a search template, script, text file, etc.) and then press the Space bar.
Yes. LaunchBar’s Services indexing rule automatically adds all commands from the Mac OS X Services menu to your LaunchBar index.
Services that take a text argument can be invoked in two different ways: You can either select the service first and press Space to enter some text, or select the text first (preferably via Instant Send) and press Tab to send it to the desired service.
Yes. LaunchBar can pass phone numbers to an arbitrary dialer application. See the LaunchBar Help, chapter “Dialing Phone numbers” for instructions how to dial via Skype or Dialectic.
Yes, put your custom actions (AppleScripts or shell scripts) in ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions. This folder is automatically indexed by LaunchBar (see the Actions indexing rule for details).
For discussions and user contributed actions see the LaunchBar Scripts forum.
Yes, it includes a powerful Clipboard History that integrates seamlessly into LaunchBar’s standard interface. By default it can be accessed with Command-\. It can be configured in LaunchBar Preferences > Clipboard.
Yes, LaunchBar has a powerful and extensible scientific Calculator built right in, which allows you to quickly perform numeric calculations directly from the keyboard. Just type Command-Space, type your calculation and press Return.
Yes. Select the script and press Return. You can optionally pass arbitrary string arguments to the script by pressing the Space bar. You can also pass file arguments. See the LaunchBar Help chapter “Running AppleScripts” for details.
Yes. Select them in LaunchBar and press Return. You can optionally pass arbitrary string arguments by pressing the Space bar. See the LaunchBar Help chapter “Running Unix Executables” for details.
It’s our goal to keep LaunchBar as stable and bug-free as possible. If we receive a bug report, we try to fix the problem as soon as possible. We provide nightly builds to make the latest bug fixes faster available, so you often don’t have to wait for the next official release.
