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No. Spotlight find things, but all it lets you do is open them. Quicksilver finds things and then lets you do all sorts of stuff with them, with just a keystroke or two. Find out more here

Make sure you have the appropriate plug-in(s) installed. If it’s something in the first pane you don’t see, make sure it’s enabled in the catalog and scanned (so that the catalog source has a number next to the checkbox).

If an action appears to be unavailable in Quicksilver’s second pane (the actions pane), ensure you have the action enabled in the Actions section of Quicksilver’s main preferences. If the action you’re looking for is obtained from a certain plugin, ensure you install the plugin before checking the ‘Actions’ preferences.

Quicksilver will index files (and other useful items) from anywhere on your computer that you tell it to. To add more files to the catalog of items that Quicksilver keeps track of, you can either customize the existing catalog entries so that they include more files, or you can add new folders to the catalog to include the files in them (and in their subfolders, if you like).

For more info, see the Catalog article.

You probably set one of your custom entries to have an infinite depth on a folder that contained a vast number of files. See Why is Quicksilver using so much memory and/or CPU?.

Localization is great, but if you want to keep Quicksilver in English, you can do this by running a simple command from Terminal.app:

defaults write com.blacktree.Quicksilver AppleLanguages -array English

Once entered, restart Quicksilver and it should be in (American) English only.

Problematic Applications

First, check to make sure you aren’t running any Known Bad Applications.

Console.app

Check the log in Console.app to see if there are any log messages or crash reports hinting at what might have gone wrong. Look on the left hand side for log messages titled ‘Quicksilver’ If you find some reports, send them to the bug tracker.

Catalog

If Quicksilver crashes at startup, firstly try running Quicksilver with a disabled Catalog. This can be done by holding ⇧ when launching Quicksilver. If Quicksilver launches with no problems, then one of your catalog entries is problematic. Try disabling them in turn to find the problem. This is done by opening ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Catalog.plist and changing the ‘Enabled’ key for each entry to ‘NO’.

Cache

If Quicksilver is trying to read a corrupt cache, this can cause it to crash. Try clearing the cache.

Plugins

An out of date or incompatible plugin may be causing Quicksilver to crash. First, make sure you are using all the latest plugins by going to the application preferences and clicking the button to check for updates.

If this does not help, try disabling plugins all plugins, then re-enabling them one at a time to try and find which one may be problematic.

Shelf Problem

If this doesn’t solve your problem, see if you have a ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Shelves/ folder. Quit Quicksilver, move it out of the way and start Quicksilver again. Sometimes the shelf gets corrupted or if you’ve copied a huge (say photoshop file) to the clipboard history QS tries to allocate huge amounts of memory and fails.

Reinstalling Quicksilver doesn’t change any saved configuration. Quicksilver stores all it’s state in the following locations (~ represents your home folder):

• ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/
• ~/Library/Preferences/com.blacktree.Quicksilver.plist
• ~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/
• ~/Library/Caches/com.blacktree.Quicksilver/

To back up Quicksilver’s settings, copy the first two items in the list to a safe location (e.g. your Desktop folder).

To reset Quicksilver to it’s initial configuration, open the ‘Application’ section of Quicksilver’s [qs://preferences#QSPrefPane main preferences] and click the ‘Reset Preferences’ button.

If your problem stops then you know it caused by something wrong in your previous configuration. Try copying items back one-by-one from your backup, restarting Quicksilver after putting back each file, until you find the cause of your trouble. Here’s what the files in the app support directory do:

Templates/ – not installed by default. The user can create this folder to add template files to use with the Make New… action

Actions.plist – list of installed actions

Catalog.plist – the configured catalog sources

Mnemonics.plist – learned inputs, defaults and abbreviations

PlugIns.plist – the list of available plug-ins and how they are configured

Triggers.plist – the configured triggers

Caches/ – another cache folder

Indexes/ – folder of indexed items

PlugIns/ – installed plug-ins

Shelves/ – where items on the Shelf and clipboards are stored

Actions/ – not installed by default. The user can create this folder to add scripts that implement custom actions