Quicksilver VS skhd

Compare Quicksilver vs skhd and see what are their differences.

skhd

Simple hotkey daemon for macOS (by koekeishiya)
InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured
Quicksilver skhd
16 64
2,706 5,566
0.3% -
7.0 3.0
about 1 month ago 27 days ago
Objective-C C
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Quicksilver

Posts with mentions or reviews of Quicksilver. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-04-25.
  • The Largest Money-Printing Element Ever Made
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Dec 2023
    Pretty sure it was Nicholas Jitkoff[1] and his team. He had done Quicksilver[2] a few years back which popularized this single input interface for osx desktop.

    [1] https://nicholas.jitkoff.com/

    [2] https://qsapp.com/

  • Should I worry about using Raycast on MacOS?
    4 projects | /r/privacy | 25 Apr 2023
    There are these open source alternatives, I haven’t checked their privacy policies or their code Maybe try and report back? https://www.cerebroapp.com https://qsapp.com https://ueli.app https://github.com/ParthJadhav/Verve
  • Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Apr 2023
    I've used Quicksilver for clipboard history historically. There is a currently a bug that I've been meaning to delve into: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver/issues/2913 but still generally usable. Particularly handy combined with adding simple AppleScript or JXA actions to manipulate the content (I have several simple ones for example to run a regex, to clean extraneous content around a number, a phone number, strip whitespace, indent 4 spaces for pasting into a markdown codeblock on SO, etc etc).

    The Shelf plug-in also very handy along similar lines.

  • The best Mac Apps to unlock your max potential (recommended by users of r/MacOs )
    13 projects | /r/MacOS | 22 Mar 2023
    Should add Quicksilver. It's the first app I install on my Macs
  • Boomer Wants to Learn Mac
    11 projects | /r/MacOS | 11 Mar 2023
    Spotlight-esque apps for enhanced keyboard driven productivity (pick one): Raycast Alfred Quicksilver
  • Why is Spotlight garbage these days?
    1 project | /r/apple | 19 Feb 2023
    Quicksilver
  • Resolving the Great Undo-Redo Quandary
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Nov 2022
    For a browsable clipboard history on macOS, I recommend LaunchBar (https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/; docs at https://www.obdev.at/resources/launchbar/help/ClipboardHisto...). I used to use the Clipboard Plugin of the free and open source app Quicksilver (https://qsapp.com/), which worked fine but was slightly less streamlined. Some people prefer Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/clipboard/).
  • Shortcat – Manipulate macOS masterfully, minus the mouse
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Oct 2022
    This is great. Reminds me of QuickSilver[1]. I'm evaluating HomeRow[2] for a VIM driving the Mac OS, will try this as well.

    I love how:

    a. accessibility features are making the OS more accessible for everyone through automation

    b. good the accessibility implementation is on the Mac that most applications are inherently compatible with solutions like this.

    [1]: https://qsapp.com/

    [2]: https://www.homerow.app/

  • Sol: Open-source Alfred/Raycast alternative for macOS
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Aug 2022
    Good to see something like this, don't forget there is already an open source alternative (pre-existing) for Alfred and Raycast. It's called Quicksilver - https://qsapp.com
  • Albert – open-source keyboard launcher for Linux
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jun 2022
    Kupfer (gnome) - https://kupferlauncher.github.io

    Quicksilver (macos): https://qsapp.com/

    I still find myself using these and enjoy the 'wei wu wei' flow of them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d4LkTstvUL4 (skip to 5 or 11 minutes in)

skhd

Posts with mentions or reviews of skhd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-17.
  • My MacBook setup (the 2024 version)
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2024
    It exists! Check out [yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai), which is nicely paired with [skhd](https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd).
  • Ask HN: Best Hacks for a Ultrawide Monitor?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2024
    I have a 49 inch CRG9 and the best recommendation for window management is Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) along with skhd (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd). Yabai is a greedy window management solution that tries to fit opened applications in given space and skhd let's you easily jump between those using keyboard shortcuts. This has massively improved my ultrawide experience.

    Only disclaimer is, configuring yabai has a slight learning curve.

  • Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
    35 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2023
    I want to echo this as well. I use a 2nd tool to help me add additional i3-like keyboard shortcuts as well (I have the ability to "stack" windows with Alt-S and rotate through them with Alt-J and Alt-K).

    It's called skhd https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

    I forgot where the script for the stacking is. I can look that up separately, but I'm on mobile atm.

  • App Switcher on MAC
    2 projects | /r/macapps | 18 Jun 2023
    Try rcmd or skhd.
  • i3 Linux -> macOS
    7 projects | /r/i3wm | 5 Jun 2023
    What I've done is configure yabai and skhd in a way that somewhat mimics my i3 setup (dotfiles in case it helps) with the help of Karabiner-Elements since Apple wouldn't recognize my keyboard layout properly (or at all...).
  • Ask HN: I've run Linux for 13 years. Is it time to switch to a Mac?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Apr 2023
  • Keyboard tricks from a macOS app dev
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Apr 2023
    I use NixOS+GNOME+pop-shell for tiling windows on Linux, and I love it!

    I am quite frequently on MacOS, and I use Yabai[0] and skhd[1], managed with Nix-Darwin for tiling windows and custom keyboard shortcuts. With how I make my Linux and MacOS builds look and feel identical it's pretty easy for me to forget when I'm on one vs the other.

    For anyone curious, here's my repository for deploying my configs[3]. It's awesome to have one source of truth for managing NixOS servers and workstations, MacOS workstations, and other Linux workstations with Nix installed.

    [0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

    [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

    [2] http://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/

    [3] https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs

  • How to disable CMD+TAB in Terminal
    1 project | /r/MacOS | 20 Apr 2023
    You can install skhd with brew install skhd, and configure it by writing the following lines inside ~/.skhdrc:
  • Recommendation for an app to execute a workflow with some hotkey !
    2 projects | /r/macapps | 5 Apr 2023
    I personally use skhd for binding hotkeys to multiple terminal commands. BetterTouchTool can also chain multiple commands, but I find it harder to edit than in an UI, depends on what you're comfortable with.
  • Alternatives to Karabiner?
    1 project | /r/macapps | 11 Mar 2023
    That, combined with skhd (for script hotkeys) and my rcmd app (for app switching) gave me a much better solution than the hard to edit config I had in Karabiner.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Quicksilver and skhd you can also consider the following projects:

hammerspoon - Staggeringly powerful macOS desktop automation with Lua

alfred-shortcuts

yabai - A tiling window manager for macOS based on binary space partitioning

photon - ⚡ Rust/WebAssembly image processing library

awesome-mac - Awesome environment for development with mac os.

company-mode - Modular in-buffer completion framework for Emacs

Amethyst - Automatic tiling window manager for macOS à la xmonad.

sol - MacOS launcher & command palette

alt-tab-macos - Windows alt-tab on macOS

KE-complex_modifications - Karabiner-Elements complex_modifications rules

simple-bar - A yabai status bar widget for Übersicht