You may have seen Quicksilver’s Radial Constellation menus, which are freaking awesome. Behold:
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get them to pop up when you click on items with a particular mouse button or modifier key? Hell yeah it would. And as it turns out, Quicksilver already contains all the science you need to do it. To get started:
- Open Quicksilver’s preference pane and tick ‘Enable advanced features.’ Allow Quicksilver to shout at you for a moment. Agree when it asks to restart itself.
- Re-open the preference pane and click ‘Plug-ins’ in the toolbar. Search for three addons: Constallation Menus, Mouse Triggers and User Interface Access. Install them.
- Click the ‘Catalog’ toolbar item and select ‘Quicksilver’ from the source list on the left. Tick ‘Proxy Objects’ on the right if it isn’t already ticked. Restart Quicksilver again.
- Open the preference pane for the third and final time and select ‘Triggers’. Click the + sign at the bottom of the window and select ‘Mouse’.
- Double-click the item and make a selection like this:
- Pick which mouse button and modifiers you want to trigger the menu:
- Enjoy.
Dan Glegg is a software developer living and working in
Brighton, United Kingdom.
He works mainly with Ruby, Objective-C, Flex and W3C standards and spends most of his time
developing products, often with startup companies.
