Enso: Quicksilver for Windows?

Design Our Products

Okay, so for all of the Quicksilver enthusiasts out there: Yes, we know about Quicksilver. And, no, we didn’t steal our ideas for Enso from Quicksilver. Enso is based on Jef Raskin’s command quasimode, an idea that has been around for years. As Quicksilver’s creators will tell you, Raskin’s ideas formed part of the inspirational basis of Quicksilver’s current design.

If you’re familiar with Quicksilver, you know roughly what Enso Launcher can do. And if you’re stuck using Windows, you may be surprised by the new things Enso offers.

The Similarities

Both Enso and Quicksilver are designed to provide a rapid and pleasant way to control your computer with the keyboard, mainly by giving you an instantly accessible overlay in which you can type. Unlike many “search” programs out there, they both show the best match as fast as you can type it.

Enso Launcher, like Quicksilver, is designed to provide rapid access to your applications by typing part of their name. Enso looks through your Start Menu and Favorites folders to find your applications and web pages. Whenever you need one, you press the Caps Lock key, type “open” and the name of the application, bookmark or Web page, and Enso will launch the appropriate application or web page. Neither program requires you to type everything out; both let you use a small number of keystrokes to access a large number of objects.

The Obvious Differences

If you give Enso a try, the first thing you’ll notice is that, by default, Enso is “quasimodal.” This means that you hold down the activation key while typing the name of a command. The difference between modal and quasimodal is the difference between Caps Lock and Shift. Why quasimodal? Because substantial evidence suggests that (a) modes cause errors, (b) mode errors cause user frustration, and (c) tactile feedback (e.g., holding a key) avoids almost all mode errors. Plus, it just feels faster.

Don’t glower at us! You can make Enso sticky/modal if you want — just use the “preferences” command. But you should give Enso’s way a try. You might be surprised by how much it grows on you after a week or two.

The second thing that might jump out at you is Enso Launcher’s “go” command. In addition to providing access to your applications and bookmarks, you can also navigate your Windows desktop. The “go” command allows you to jump to any open window by typing part of its name, or to a specific open tab in Firefox or Internet Explorer. With simple commands such as “close,” “minimize,” “maximize,” and “open with…,” you can have a single way to navigate your desktop.

The One Big Difference

The big difference between Enso and Quicksilver is not that Enso provides almost instant access to every currently open tab and window. Nor is it Enso’s quasimodal behavior. It’s that Enso is a command system, not a search program.

Most people use Quicksilver as a “search-and-launch” program. Mostly, they type to find the object they’re interested in, and then press return to “launch” the object. Quicksilver has an excellent feature where you can search for an object, search for the verb you want to apply to that object, and perform the action. For instance, you can search for a document, then press “Tab” and select “reveal.” Rather than launching the document in its default application, you have just told Quicksilver to reveal its location in the Finder.

Enso doesn’t provide the search interface, but a completely transparent and incredibly powerful mechanism for choosing commands that — get this — can operate on any selection. You can use Enso’s “learn as open…” command in a “Save” dialogue, or on the Windows desktop. You can even select a URL in your web browser’s address bar and “learn as open my favorite website.”

As Nicholas Jitkoff, the developer of Quicksilver, told us recently:

While I’ve been trying to explore similar techniques in Quicksilver for quite a while, few people were able to grasp anything beyond search-and-launch.

Quicksilver’s focus is on high-performance searching and on providing the best set of verbs to go with each indexable object. Enso’s focus is on providing a transparent system of issuing commands that can operate on anything, anywhere on your computer.

Of course, sometimes this difference is irrelevant. Both Quicksilver and Enso allow you to transparently open applications and websites simply by typing part of the application’s name. Quicksilver uses a “locate-app-and-open” syntax, while Enso uses a “open-app” syntax that follows the natural word order of the English language. In the end, with both programs, you simply type what you want to be open, and it opens.

But, as you’ll soon see, Enso’s “one big difference” opens up a world of context-sensitive commands that are not naturally part of Quicksilver’s design.

Operating on Selections

Enso has many commands that operate on your selection. Whether you’re typing in the name of a file, or editing a document in Microsoft Word, Enso’s “calculate” command will compute an expression. We take away your Caps Lock key, but give you back the “upper case” command, which allows you to transform any selection into all capitals. Better, we add the “lower case” command so that you can transform other people’s shouted IMs into less drastic text. You can “word count” text in Notepad and Microsoft Word, all with the same command interface.

And that’s just the beginning. With Enso, you can select an address in an email to a friend, then type, “add map”; the map instantly appears inside your email. Or, select an equation and type, “typeset” — immediately your equation is transformed into elegant type-set language. If you can make a selection, Enso’s commands are likely to work with it.

What’s Missing

Admittedly, Enso is not as mature as Quicksilver, which — although a self-proclaimed Beta product — has been around for years. Because it is older and has had longer to mature, Quicksilver offers two important features that Enso yet lacks.

First, Quicksilver indexes many more files on your computer, and adds many more of your files, music, and other information to its search namespace. We plan on adding these features to Enso, but for now, Enso is restricted to (a) what’s in the Start Menu, (b) what’s in your Favorites folder, and (c) whatever you tell Enso to remember with the “learn as open…” command. Think of Enso’s “open” command as the fastest and most memorable universal bookmark system; it’s not yet searching your hard drive like Quicksilver does, but you can use it to open all those things that you use regularly, and to remember all those things you use occasionally.

Second, Quicksilver has a developer API. We’ve just released an Enso API, but it is still in prototype form. The documentation and sample commands are in wiki form, so jump in and help us out.

Aside from that, there’s only one other major difference: Quicksilver is free. Enso Launcher is not. Maybe one day it will be. We’ll see what we can do. But for now, that’s how we eat.

Please note: Since January 15, 2008, all Enso products have been free. Any information in the above post about prices or licensing issues is, therefoure, out-of-date. To get the latest version of Enso, free of charge, see the main Enso page.

You say Enso might be free one day, and Quicksilver is going open source. Maybe some cooperation in the far future? just a suggestion.

I have developed a command to convert a test selection using Google’s search built-in universal converter. I would really like to be able to share this with friends or anybody that may want ot use it. When is this going to be possible?

So when are we going to see Enso for the Mac?

Why isn’t there some way to bring up an application that may or may not be running? If I don’t know if Firefox is currently running I think it would be nice to have some way to launch it if it isn’t running, or bring it to the foreground otherwise.

This really is how I work, I want a browser to preform some operation. I don’t want to ever create a second browser and Enzo currently makes me remember if I currently have Firefox open to match this behavior.

As I’ve been fiddling with the API recently, I realized that implementing the functionality provided by the Enso API for X11 would be fairly easy. The hardest part of implementing Enso would be implementing all the core-commands that it supports to use the appropriate methods on the target platform. I also imagine it has a few more internal methods for handling stuff than I get exposed in the developer API, which would probably be a bit more tricky to rustle up.

I was compelled to use Windows instead of Linux for a month or so recently and found Enso while searching for something besides Launchy to mimic QuickSilver for me.

I was impressed with Enso and really like the “Learn as Open” command, but the one thing that kept me using Launchy more than Enso was that every time I wanted to launch an application, I had to type “Open” then start typing the application name. I really don’t want to type Open over and over, I just want to do what Launchy and QuickSilver let you do, type a very few characters and launch.

If Enso could be setup to assume the “Open” command unless otherwise commanded, that would go a long way towards improving its usability for me.

Finally, although I’m still trying to decide if holding CapsLock is better than tapping CtrlSpace, I was surprised that holding CapsLock with my pinky did not really slow me down in typing letters that my pinky would normally happen, like “A”. Interesting.

Interesting - I just moved to a mac and have missing Enso badly - actually, I reverted back to my windows box just so I could use it. I’ve used Enso before Quicksilver, so when I tried out Quicksilver, I had some expectations - in the end, I just ended up using it for opening apps and thats it - I had to watch some tutorials to learn the other commands — as where with Enso, the interface itself pretty much explained it all to me.

I see the differences and hope that a mac port of Enso comes soon. I feel pretty certain that Windows is getting pushed to the back burner.

Great work and great clarification. Quasi!!!!

I’d love to see the mac version. How long do we have to wait for one? Good write up, btw.

Nice write-up. After the link from Daring Fireball I was just looking at Quicksliver today and wondering about the similarities with Enso.

I’ve been using a launcher for the Mac called Sapiens that has a different approach based on gesture recognition and “learning”.

Count me among those hoping for a Mac version of Enso.

“Quicksilver has an excellent feature where you can search for an object, search for the verb you want to apply to that object, and perform the action.” (NOUN-VERB)

“Quicksilver uses a “locate-app-and-open” syntax, ” (NOUN-VERB) “while Enso uses a “open-app” syntax that follows the natural word order of the English language.” (VERB-NOUN)

One aspect of Enso that has always bugged me has been this verb-noun construction. Section 3-3 of The Humane Interface argues strongly for why noun-verb construction should be used instead. Quicksilver follows this principle.

When I want to open a window, I am thinking about the phrase in the title of the window, not the fact that the command to look for it is “Open.” Not being able to hit Caps Lock and immediately type the title breaks the flow of my thought, and makes the Enso experience much more jarring compared to Quicksilver.

I love Enso. I’m probably using a small fraction of what it can do. But the instant response on screen makes my operations so much easier. I use auto-complete with the tab key a lot. To open Microsoft Outlook, I simply type o ou For Internet Explorer, o ie. For a Windows Explorer window, o wi. This impresses the heck out of my colleagues and our IT people, and speeds up my work immensely.

At home, I use a Mac. I’ve tried Quicksilver, but it’s slower than Enso and not as intuitive for me. Please hurry with that Mac version.

The commands I used above didn’t come out right, because I typed them with brackets. (No, duh, can’t use them where html is allowed). They should read o(tab)ou, o(tab)ie, and o(tab)wi.