I read Merlin's tip on using QuickSilver's append to file command to manage a Getting Things Done inbox list. My lists are outlines in OmniOutliner, but I wanted to be able to do the same thing. Below is an AppleScript that you can invoke from QuickSilver, which will take the contents of the clipboard and append it to the children of a topic named "@Inbox". I've installed it in a directory that is part of my QuickSilver catalog, and the activation is as follows:

1. Trigger QuickSilver
2. Hit "." and type the text of the new inbox item into the text input window
3. Do Command-A Command-C to select that text and paste it onto the clipboard
4. activate the script to create the new inbox item.

Here's the code for the script:

-- can copy to clipboard and have script get from there

on appendClipboardToRow(doc, t)
	tell application "OmniOutliner"
		repeat with r in rows of doc
			if topic of r is t then
				exit repeat
			end if
		end repeat
		--	set r to row 1 of doc
		set l to last child of r
		set n to make child at after l -- really want to do after
		set topic of n to the clipboard
	end tell
end appendClipboardToRow

tell application "OmniOutliner"
	set d to document "Next Actions.ooutline"
end tell

appendClipboardToRow(d, "@Inbox")

It's not ideal that I have to load the text into the clipboard but I couldn't figure out how to hook up the text in the QuickSilver input box and the AppleScript. In an ideal world, I could enter text into the text box, hit tab to select the "run shell script with standard input" command which would use the text as the standard input to a script (you could tab one more time and supply script arguments to be fancy). Unfortunately no such command exists.

So here's a question for the group/web mind. Is there a better way to do this?