I'm another one of those people who more or less only uses QS as an app launcher (and have for a couple years), as embarrassed as I should probably be to admit it.
Spotlight has always been consistently slower in my experience, and Leopard hasn't improved it enough to change that. I've actually added all my drives to the "do not index" list to kind of pseudo-disable it, since I pretty much know where everything is on my machine anyway.
I use Cmd-Space as my QS trigger, and one trick I learned a while back is that holding down one key for a second, instead of typing several, will launch the corresponding result right away, no Enter-press needed. Another reason it beats Spotlight as an app launcher (at least for me) is that Spotlight seems to need your letters to be
consecutive in the results' names, whereas QS only requires that they occur
somewhere in each result's name in the right order. So, for example, a Spotlight search for "
AZ" will pull up a lot of D
AZStudio stuff and Poser content from D
AZ, but I can type the same two letters into QS and get the app I'm looking for —
App
Zapper. I use the same method to teach QS shortcuts for almost all the apps I use that are more mnemonic than systematic and range from just one to (seldom) three letters:
DC for
Di
ctionary
Hold down
B for
BOINCManager
IC for
Image
Capture
ICH for
iChat
FI for
Firefox
MO for
Motion
MD for
Mo
do
Hold down
O for
Onyx
GE for
Google
Earth
AC for
Activity Monitor
RD for
Remote
Desktop
IPL for
iPhoto
Library Manager
SH for
Sound
Hack
PB for
Photo
Booth
MT for
Mac
tracker
MP for
Mac
Pilot
LS for
Little
Snitch Configuration
PG for
Pa
ges
...and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, usually depending more on what letters stand out in my mind as being "significant" (often because they start a syllable) and/or are conveniently placed on the keyboard than anything else.
If I wanted to, I could launch several apps at once, by hitting the comma in between each shortcut before hitting Enter to set them all off. I could even uninstall them all at once by hitting Tab, and typing in something like "tr" to select "Move to Trash" as my action instead of "Open". If I type in a period instead of letter shortcuts, the subject area turns into a text field, for which the default action would automatically be to plaster it on my screen in large type.
(Instead, I could use it to start off a new email message, specifying the recipient in QS as well.)
Quicksilver's real power lies in its extensibility, and there are a lot of plugins available right through QS' preferences window that give you access to actions having to do with everything from dialing phone numbers over Bluetooth to the aforementioned Mail actions to changing your desktop picture to working with a Subversion repository. You begin to see how Quicksilver's "object/action/optional subject" thinking can be applied to just about anything.
Personally, I'm a little bit too lazy to use QS for anything other than app launching, simply because that only involves one step. I'm on a PowerBook, so it's no big stretch to move between the "mouse" and keyboard. YMMV, naturally. There's a learning curve, or perhaps a settling-in-together-getting-to-know-each-other curve, but I've gotta say, it feels weird now when I use a Mac that doesn't have QS running. It's one of those things like Exposé that silently sneaks its way into your computing habits until you realize that using a computer is jarring without it.
