tin-men

Starting Skitch using Quicksilver

If you’re lucky enough to have got hold of an invite for the Skitch beta, chances are that you’re loving it more than you could ever love your own children. For those who don’t know, it’s an amazing screenshot taking application. It has a nice feature that allows you to press command - shift - 5 to bring up the cross hairs to take a screenshot whenever the application is running. You can of course have Skitch starting when you start your mac, but this does take up resources on your computer (not much admittedly, but it still takes some). What if there was a way to assign command - shift - 5 to start up Skitch and then switch to the cross hairs mode…?

But there is! Using my favourite application of all time, Quicksilver. Here’s what you need to do.

Firstly download this file: SkitchQuicksilver.zip

Then you need to double click on the zip and pop the resulting file in the following folder:
~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions

Restart Quicksilver.

Now activate Quicksilver and hit command ‘ which will bring up the triggers pane of the preferences.

Click on the plus icon at the bottom of the window and choose HotKey.

In the pop up window, type enough of Skitch Screenshot.scpt to get it to show up, then choose save.

Now you need to double click on the triggers section of the new hot key you just created. Choose the Settings tab, and then click on the Edit button to set whatever key combination you want. I have it as command - shift - 5.

Now head over to the Scope tab and choose Disabled in the selected applications from the drop down menu. In the box, type Skitch.app. This is only needed if you set a key combination that is used by Skitch.

This script will start Skitch and bring up the cross hairs. If you want it to do something else, open up the script in Script Editor and find the following line:

keystroke "5" using {command down, shift down}

And then replace the 5 with whatever you want to do (you might want to change the Quicksilver hot key to reflect the change). The numbers in Skitch are:

• 5 - Crosshair
• 6 - Full Screen
• 7 - Frame

That’s it. Enjoy. Comments and feedback are appreciated.

Very nice! Although I might actually save the trigger as a “Run as Applescript” command so that the applescript files aren’t needed.

That works too, but I like to edit my scripts in script editor, so having a .scpt file works better for me. It also makes it easier to install for the less technical too.

Oh. Sweet. Awesome!

What happens when you can’t get “Skitch Screenshot.scpt” to show up when defining the Hotkey? I can’t get past that step.

Make sure the file is in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions and if that fails, drag your Actions folder onto the Catalog pane of the Quicksilver preferences to make sure it’s indexed.

Ok, dragging the Actions folder into the Catalog pane fixes it. It was not being indexed before. Thank you Graham!
-Don

Maybe anybody wrote applescript or automator action, to automatically upload to myskitch ?

Becuase skitch isn’t currently scriptable beyond GUI scripting that won’t be possible.