I’ve been playing with Quicksilver for the mac for about three weeks now and absolutely love it.

One of the ways I use it is when I work with firewall rules. I work on my firewalls in CLI only. My standard work flow is to open a change log, which is a text file, scroll down to the bottom and start creating new firewall rules. Many times I have to log into the firewall and copy and paste rules back and forth to build a new VPN tunnel, for example. The change logs are kept in a CVS sandbox, which is in an encrypted volume I have to mount.

The change logs themselves are buried in a directory structure within that volume. Before Quicksilver, I had to drill down through the directory structure then scroll through numerous change log files (one for every firewall I maintain plus previous firewall config backups).

Now with Quicksilver, my workflow becomes more intuitive. Here’s how I do it now:

Invoke QS > Open Shelf to have it handy (you need the Shelf Module)> SSH to firewall(s), copy any needed lines to the shelf > open the change log by typing part of its filename into QS and letting it find it > mix and match lines in any order from the shelf to the change log by ‘dragging and dropping’ > copy and paste final rules into firewall > commit firewall change log to CVS by issuing the command in QS and sending it to the terminal (you need the Terminal Module).

You can also run commands in terminal and send the output (any output) to QS for action. For example, you can grep through previous firewall configs for a particular command, pipe the output to QS and from there put it on the shelf. Now you can drag and drop it wherever you may need it. You need the Terminal Module and Shelf Module to do this. Once Terminal Module is installed, you’ll have the ‘qs’ command available in terminal.

There’s also a great Qucksilver quick reference sheet here.

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