Clearing Quicksilver’s clipboard to free up RAM

I’ve been using Quicksilver for so long it’s second-nature, and I hate being on a computer without it. One thing I use regularly is the clipboard history. The downside to this is that occasionally I copy something big into your clipboard, like a chunk of formatted text in Word or a range of cells in Excel (noticing a pattern here?), and if I do that a few times, Quicksilver starts to hog RAM.

When my macbook starts to drag, I look up at atMonitor’s menu bar, and inevitably the RAM is maxed at 99%. Most of the time in this situation, clicking the RAM menu shows that Quicksilver is using 500+MB, which is generally because it has some large thing (or several) in the clipboard history. You can clear the history by deleting ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Shelves/QSPasteboardHistory.qsshelf, so I’ve added the following alias to my .bash_profile:

alias clear-qs-clipboard='rm ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Shelves/QSPasteboardHistory.qsshelf'

I generally invoke this with DTerm (another spectacular free app I use frequently), and I’m back in business.