I’ve become a Quicksilver junky. It really simplifies my life in front of my Mac. While investigating some of it’s plugins this morning I started playing with the terminal and iTerm plugins and found that I could fire up webrick very quickly using quicksilver. It’s not practical if you already have iTerm open, but it’s a nifty trick. For those who are interested, here’s the process in a nutshell.

First you need to make sure that the iTerm or Terminal plugins are enabled in Quicksilver. Open your QS preferences and go to plugins. If you don’t have iTerm or Terminal plugins enabled, turn one or both of them on (whichever you prefer).

Go to the Quicksilver preferences, general tab and choose command on the left. On the right I chose to make my spacebar switch to text mode so that I could see my command as I type it.

Now that everything is setup in Quicksilver we can try it out. You may need to restart QS to if these next steps don’t work.

On my Mac, I have Quicksilver mapped to cnrl+spacebar to activate it. Activate quicksilver and press your spacebar which will get you into text mode. Type in your directory followed by the command as you see in the image below.

cd ~/sites/projectdir; script/server webrick -p 3002

Notice the semicolon. It allows you to put multiple commands on one line.

After you type the command tab over to the verb panel and type “iterm” which should bring up the command “run a text command in iTerm”.

Execute it. You should see iTerm fire up with the command you entered and webrick should now be running for that project.