February 24, 2007

Juggling Keyboard/Spotlight/Quicksilver ⌃⌥⌘ ␣ key combos

Historically, the key combo shortcut for invoking Spotlight, invoking Quicksilver, and toggling the international Unicode input keyboards are all the same, namely, Command Space (⌘ ␣). To include all three features in my workflow, here's what I've done:

Quicksilver has long used the Control key (⌃) as another standard option, and it also has a double-tap option for invoking. And then, moving the international keyboard input to utilize the Option key (⌥) everything gets cleared up. So, all I need remember is Command key for Spotlight to search the contents of files on my drive, Option key for for toggling back and forth with Greek input, and Control key for Quicksilver and all its magic. It quickly becomes muscle-memory if you use them as frequently as I do.

Here's the full summary:

⌘ ␣

Spotlight invoke

⌥⌘ ␣

Spotlight window invoke

⌥ ␣

Toggle two most recent input keyboard

⌃⌥ ␣

Cycle among input keyboards

⌃ ␣

Quicksilver invoke

⌃⌃

Quicksilver double-tap invoke

(Truth be told, I've set the primary invoke for Quicksilver to ⌃⌘ ␣ but still always use the ⌃⌃ double-tap to invoke. This is because I've kept Word's default ⌃ ␣ as "remove character formatting", which I use a ton.)

Update: In Snow Leopard, you can ignore the "Select next keyboard" command that cycles through them, since now you can hold down the "Select Previous" key combination and get a nice HUD to move around.

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