Launching iTerm shells from Quicksilver

Quicksilver’s “actions”

In Quicksilver, you can have “Actions”. They reside in the directory:

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions

An action can be an AppleScript script, or an executable shell file.

Lets say you have an executable script named “my_prog” in that directory.

You call up Quicksilver’s window, type “.” to enter the text mode, and then you type “ssh-hostname”. In the Action box below, you select “my_prog”, and press enter.

Here’s what happens next: Quicksilver runs the program as if you typed this in a terminal: my_prog ssh-hostname.

I won’t describe this technique in detail because it’s not the one I use… too much keyboard typing.

The other way

Lets say you have a directory ~/quicksilver and that you have added that directory to Quicksilver’s catalogue.

You then place an executable script named “ssh-hostname” in that directory.

You call up Quicksilver’s window, and begin to type “ssh-ho”… and QS completes to “ssh-hostname” by itself. You then press enter.

Here’s what happens next: Quicksilver runs the program as if you typed this in a terminal: ssh-hostname.

This is the technique I use. It involves as many files as I have things to launch, but it’s a small price to pay to have Quicksilver’s auto completion :)

Installing the required stuff

You should already have these installed:

• iTerm
• Quicksilver
• Growl (very optional)

Now, the python modules.

First, we need qslaunch. So fire-up a terminal (preferably iTerm since it’s the subject of this post!) and type:

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$ sudo easy_install qslaunch

You’ll obviously need to type in your password for sudo to gain administrative privileges.

Then, if you wish, you can install Growl’s python bindings.

The only reason to install these is to have some visual feedback if something goes wrong.

They are actually annoying to install because you first need to get Growl’s SDK disk image from Growl’s sources page.

Once the disk is downloaded and mounted, copy the directory Bindings/python from the disk image to your desktop. Then, in your terminal:

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$ cd ~/Desktop/python
$ sudo python setup.py install

You can now delete the copy of the directory you just made and unmount the disk.

Creating a launcher script

The next step is to create the actual script that’ll be aliased to many names using hard links.

If you want to install the sample script as ~/scripts/qs_launcher.py:

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$ cd ~
$ mkdir scripts
$ cd scripts
$ wget 'http://greyworld.net/media/dynamic/qslaunch_sample/qs_launcher.py'
$ chmod a+x ~/scripts/qs_launcher.py

Here’s highlighted version: qs_launcher.py. It’s identical to sample_name.py in the examples directory of the source, with less comments.

The script has the following parts:

1. the usual import block;
2. a commands variable;
3. a main() function that extracts the “program name”, and then call execute() on the commands variable.

The interesting part is the commands variable. It’s a list of rules. Each rule is a tuple with two elements:

1. a regular expression,
2. a command to execute.

The command is actually a 4-elements tuple, but this example exclusively uses shortcuts, so it looks like a function call.

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(r'^local$', iterm.bookmark('A Local Shell', 'tab'))

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(r'^local-finder$', iterm.bookmark('A Local Shell', 'tab', \
    cd=finder.front_most_path)),

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(r'^s-(?P<server>[^\.]*)$', iterm.shell_exec('ssh %(server)s.example.org.', 'tab'))

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(r'^s-(?P<server>.*)$', iterm.shell_exec('ssh %(server)s.', 'tab')),

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ssh host.there.com.

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(r'^gnuplot$', iterm.shell_exec('/bin/bash -l -c gnuplot'))

Setting up Quicksilver

Now you need a directory to place the files as seen by Quicksilver. I’ll assume the use of ~/quicksilver:

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$ mkdir ~/quicksilver
$ cd ~/quicksilver

Lets add a few links to match our script:

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$ ln ~/scripts/qs_launcher.py local
$ ln ~/scripts/qs_launcher.py local-finder
$ ln ~/scripts/qs_launcher.py s-abc
$ ln ~/scripts/qs_launcher.py s-def.google.com.py
$ ln ~/scripts/qs_launcher.py gnuplot

You can test to see if it works:

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$ ./local

Should open an iTerm window.

Now, go into quicksilver’s “Catalog” configuration section, in the “Custom” tab, and add a new “File & folder scanner”. In the file requester, select the directory you just made.

When you make changes in that directory, you need to wait until QS rescans it, or you simply go back to that window and hit the circular arrow on the bottom-right of the window (similar to: ↻).

The reason I put a “.py” in “s-def.google.com.py” is that QS, at least on my system, won’t launch things ending with “.com”. Maybe it’s a Windows related thing with some other software I have installed.

I really don’t care about the true cause because using “.py” solves the problem anyway.

Launching stuff

Call up Quicksilver’s window, type one of the new commands, and press enter!