david sidlinger

Quicksilver is the best thing since any kind of bread. I can’t live on a Mac without it, and I even find myself attempting to use it on Windows when I’m at work.

One its tricks that I use all the time is “Go to Directory in Terminal”. This command opens a Terminal window and cd’s to the directory that was the subject of the Quicksilver sentence. Very handy.

Recently, this command got “stuck”. Every time I would open a Terminal window, it would change to a directory I had opened with Quicksilver. Nothing seemed to make Terminal forget the command. Since I didn’t know how Quicksilver caused the command to be run when the window was created, I wasn’t able to do anything about it.

My first guess was a term file that was created by Quicksilver and set as the default. No dice. I wasn’t able to find any term files that I hadn’t created myself.

Next, I thought it might have altered my .profile file. Nope. It was still just like I left it.

Turns out there is a Terminal preference I was unaware of. If a key named ExecutionString exists in the com.apple.Terminal domain, all new Terminal windows will execute it upon creation. My cd command was found there. My best guess is that Quicksilver modifies the key, opens a window, and then returns it to its previous state. It must have somehow lost its mond and forgotten to return ExecutionString to its original state. Quicksilver does crash on me sometimes.

If this happens to you, correcting it is fairly easy:

defaults delete com.apple.Terminal ExecutionString

When I first found this, I tried to think of some other way to put the preference to use, but I think I’ll just use .profile and term files.