Efficient Program Launching with Launchy
Posted by Jon Lee in Efficiency, Reviews, tags: Efficiency, free, Launchy, review, shortcutsThis super handy piece of software was recommended to me by two readers, Luke and Carl. In my post about streamlining the start menu, they had both mentioned Launchy as the tool of choice for launching programs effectively and it won the 2007 SourceForge Community Choice Award for best new project. With two recommendations and an award I decided to install it and run it for a few weeks and give my thoughts on it.
What it does
Launchy is a key-stroke launcher (similar to Vista’s start menu search). It runs in the background until you bring it up by pressing a key-stroke (Ctrl-Spacebar by default though I set mine to Win-Spacebar). From the minimal menu, you type the program you want to launch and it will do it. You don’t even need to spell correctly as it makes educated guesses as you type. Anything in your start menu is available for launching.
Plugins
Although very useful by itself, plug-ins give Launchy much more functionality and as a matter of fact, several popular plugins are included by default. Here’s what some of them can do:
- Index bookmarks, control panel applications or even mp3 files.
- Act as a file explorer with auto-complete directory names
- Launch URIs directly in a browser
- Run custom commands with arguments (i.e. look up a definition of a word)
- Do complex calculations quickly
Personal Review
I’ve been using Launchy for several weeks now and I find that I use it for almost everything. It really is the quickest way to launch applications and I love how intuitive it is. It learns from your previous launches so if I simply type “f”, it will come up with “Firefox” instead of “Files and Settings Transfers Wizard” even though the latter may be placed first alphabetically.
I have noticed a bug where it would randomly disappear completely when I enable and disable multiple monitors. I have to end up ending the task in task manager and restarting the application to get the launchy window back. Also, the interface is skinnable but I found that most of the skins available from the repository are downright ugly.
Furthermore, with the calculator plugin enabled, it takes precendent over single letter searches. For example, typing in “e” will be recognized as the math constant (Napier’s constant 2.718…) instead of the letter “e”. As a result, it is very hard to search for E Text Editor.
Regardless, those are minor bugs and I would readily recommend Launchy to Window users everywhere. For XP users it can replicate Vista’s useful start menu search and for Vista users it adds more intuitive searching on top of additional functionality. As for other operating systems, Mac users have Quicksilver and Linux have Katapult.
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