Quick and Easy Domain Whois with Quicksilver

I perform a lot of domain whois lookups. If I have an idea for a domain and want to check its availability, I generally do a search for domain whois and then lookup my domain with one of the listings.

There’s nothing wrong with this process, but with Quicksilver we can improve any task we do regularly.

Creating a Domain Whois Bookmark in Quicksilver

One great way is by creating a bookmark of the domain whois site, with the search query as ***. We would do this for a site like DomainTools like this: http://whois.domaintools.com/***

You can see below I have created two boomarks, one for whois and one for IMDB.

You also need to enable the “Web Search Module” in Quicksilver Plugins and restart Quicksilver to enable it.

Now, to use this you would invoke Quicksilver (Command+Space). Press Command+R to refresh the index if you didn’t restart.

Type the name of your bookmark, in our case “whois” and press tab. The action should be “Search For…”, followed by a textfield. Enter the domain lookup and press enter. It should look something like this:

And then:

There’s another way to accomplish this though.

Domain Whois Through Terminal and Quicksilver

If you look at the image above of the Quicksilver plugins, you’ll notice I also have the Terminal Module enabled. This plugin lets you run Terminal commands directly from Quicksilver.

This is a much quicker method because you don’t need to load a web browser–only a terminal.

The workflow for this is Command+Space (invoke Quicksilver), Enter “.whois mactips.org”–note the period before the whois. Press tab and start typing “terminal” and the “Run a Text Command in Terminal” action will appear:

Hit enter and you have your whois:

The period before the “.whois mactips.org” enables a textbox field–so you can enter data and pass it to applications. We’ll dive into this more in the future.

There you have it, two easy ways to perform a domain whois.

The great part is you can do this with any command or bookmark. Search your favorite sites directly from Quicksilver or have easy access to the terminal.