Appending text to Quicksilver, alternate method

Last year, Merlin posted a hint that became quite popular: Quicksilver: Append to a text file from anywhere, which uses Quicksilver to easily add text to arbitrary files.

Unfortunately there are a couple of limitations to the Append/Prepend method, as mentioned in the comments of that hint — you cannot use this to add text to a file that starts with a period (such as .reminders), and the text file in question apparently must end with a .txt extension.

Here’s an easy workaround, still using Quicksilver. (You might need to install the Terminal module through the Plugins preferences in Quicksilver, but that’s easily done if necessary.) Let’s assume that you want to add an item to your todo list.

1. Call up Quicksilver with Ctrl-space (or your custom command).
2. Hit ‘.’ (period) to begin input.
3. Type: echo "Write article" >> ~/todo.txt
4. Tab over to next pane
5. Begin typing RUN COMM to bring up ‘Run Command in Shell’
6. Hit Return.
7. You’re done.

What we’re doing in Step 3 is saying ‘add this text to the end of the file todo.txt in my home directory.’ Obviously, you can tell it to do anything you want there, such as:

echo "REM 25 Nov 2005 MSG Family Movie Day?%" >> ~/.reminders

which adds an event for Remind to use.