Quicksilver keeps crashing. There, it’s out in the open now.

Every so often I hit Command+Space to launch something, and nothing happens; I look up at my menu bar and find the Quicksilver icon has disappeared. The app I can’t live without just goes “foop” into thin air.

Every time this happens, I grumble and moan and have to use Spotlight to re-launch Quicksilver; and the simple act of invoking a Spotlight search makes me even grumpier.

It turns out I’m not the only one having this problem. A bunch of people have submitted crash reports to Quicksilver bugs forum, describing very similar circumstances.

Even with this minor inconvenience, I’m reluctant to stop using Quicksilver. But today, just out of curiosity, I downloaded Butler, which I haven’t played with for years. I must confess to being quite impressed; it appears to do almost everything I use Quicksilver for. So far, with a few hours of testing, the speed of searching seems a little hit-and-miss; sometimes Butler finds what I want straight away - faster than Quicksilver. But on other occasions, Butler displays the Spinning Pizza of Doom after I’ve typed a few characters.

Nonetheless, Butler looks like a worthy competitor to Quicksilver; if anyone’s done any more long-term tests of the two, I’d be interested to hear their opinions of them both.

And yeah, I know about LaunchBar.