Better append tip in Quicksilver, and faster file access…also in Quicksilver.

I’ve been experimenting with the Merlin Mann-popularized tip of appending text to a file from Quicksilver. And it’s cool. But, I like a good chunk of whitespace to separate some things. But how to get the whitespace in there? Hitting return just saves the text and closes the window, and putting a \n just adds those characters to the file.

The trick to getting new lines or blank lines in Quicksilver is to either press control or option while hitting return. Then, you can add empty lines to your heart’s content. It’s awesome.

Also, bonus tip: If you’re in Quicksilver and you want to browse your user directory/desktop, just press ~ after activating Quicksilver. Then you can use the arrow keys to browse starting at your home directory. I didn’t know that this existed until 5 minutes ago, but I want to start using it more.

Quick searching with grep

find ./ -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -ls 'words words words'

Here’s a faster way to grep. If you know the type of file you want to look for (let’s say PHP), there’s no need to grep through everything (like images, or log files).