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Comment by justinchen | Hacker News Reader

I've moved on to Alfred. http://www.alfredapp.com/

I installed Alfred on Sunday, and am trying to adjust.

For all of the Alfred-switchers in here - does anyone else find the folder navigation pretty unintuitive? Or am I doing it wrong?

LaunchBar / QS's approach: Type "Documents" to bring up folder, use up & down to select things, and left or right arrows to drill into them. Typing anything searches everything within the current folder. So intuitive to me!

Alfred: "Documents" brings up folder, Command+Down(?) to open it. Then use up & down to select things, and Command+Down to drill in. If you want to say, open a folder in Finder, you have to hit Command+O or "Enter" and "Enter". You can search but only by the first letters in the filename (not "pdf") .

So for your converts - what's the deal, do you prefer this style, am I doing it wrong, or do you just get used to it..?

I couldn't adjust. Alfred may not be trying to be Quicksilver, but where it does go its own way it feels actively worse.

Everything in QS is very regular, Object-Verb style interaction with fuzzy completion of both. Alfred has a wartier, more irregular interaction model: it's Verb-Object if you want to type the verb, but it seems to push you into command key combos, which operate on a Object-Verb basis, and there doesn't feel like much logic as to what's available as what.

the object then verb description precisely describes what is nice and uniform about QS, thanks for articulating it so clearly!

Have you tried using the right arrow to go into your Documents folder?

E.g. Type "docu", Documents shows up as top results, right arrow, then pick your action either by arrow down or cmd + number.

If all you want to do is open a folder, prefix your search term by "open" or hit the spacebar first (shortcut for "open"). If you want to reveal it in Finder, just type "find" first, and if you want to search inside files, just type "in" first.

If you give Alfred a chance (and accept that it isn't trying to be Quicksilver), you'll really get into a groove with it.

Cmd-Down open folders and launches apps/docs in Finder too. I've never used Cmd-O/Enter for that task. To me, Alfred seems much more consistent with my use of OSX key commands than Quicksilver's left/right/tab/enter scheme.

Me too, 5 days ago. Maybe it's time to switch back? Alfred hasn't surprise me in any way, maybe QS set the bar too high.

This update fixes proxy objects, which is huge. I haven't seen any other program come close to QS's flexibility. I can do "Current Selection > Search/Email/etc.", "Current Application > Show Menu", all kinds of cool stuff.

The last example shows all the menu items for the app in quicksilver, so I can search through it. Kind of like the search box in the app's help menu, but faster and easier (just make sure to bind that action to a key).

Yes, gotta love proxies.

Select an item in finder, press [alt-cmd-space] and type "email", [tab], then type the name of the person (QS searches your address book) and then hit enter to send off.

EDIT: Not very stable though...crashed it just now when trying to use the proxy select to append to file.

I experienced a few crashes after applying the update.

It's a lot more stable now that I trashed the associated .plist and reinstalled.

Me too. for a couple of months now already.. Bought the powerpack, which I don't use.. :-)

Same. While QS is clearly more powerful, there seems to be speed advantages to using Spotlight's database (which is what Alfred does).

I like Alfred quite a bit, but if this is a serious attempt to develop quicksilver back into relevance, I'm going to have to give the new version a try. Just to tinker, if nothing else.

To me, QS was more powerful, but Alfred was more polished.

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