Launchy

Saturday 10 February 2007 — This is nearly 18 years old. Be careful.

As a Windows user, I envy a few things about the Macs around me. One of them is Quicksilver, the mind-reading launcher and shortcutter for OS X. There are a few simple-minded clones for Windows, though none of them come close to its beauty and power.

The best of the bunch that I’ve tried so far is Launchy. It seems to find the things I want, it remembers what my choices were, and it has plug-ins that allow it to (for example) interpret Firefox keyword shortcuts. I’m using it more and more to run programs, relying less and less on my existing methods (command line, start menu, and Free Launch Bar).

Comments

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sean 3:00 PM on 10 Feb 2007
I have to agree with you... Launchy's a great app. I had been using Google Desktop's ctrl-ctrl popup as a launcher, but Launchy is much better. I resisted it at first, and kept reaching for my quick launch shortcuts. Decided to turn the QL toolbar off to force myself to use Launchy - now I'm trained, and I don't miss those shortcuts at all :)
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David Chen 6:26 PM on 10 Feb 2007
Quicksilver was one of the major reasons why I use a Mac as my primary computer... Apples seem crippled without it. Thanks for the heads up about Launchy, I'll have to try it out on my Windows box.
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Jeff 8:25 PM on 10 Feb 2007
Scott Hanselman posted about his similar search a few months ago. He listed a number of apps - I tried colibri and have found it pretty nice.
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Eugene Van den Bulke 4:05 AM on 11 Feb 2007
Maybe you should also look at Enso : http://www.humanized.com/products/. I have never used Quicksilver but some say as far as the launcher is concerned it is as close at it gets ... plus it is written in Python :P
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alex dante 12:21 AM on 12 Feb 2007
Lemme second the recommendation for Find & Run Robot, which has been indispensable to me since I found it.

But Launchy's ability to parse the FireFox search engines is very tempting, esp. as I tend to recreate them in FARR anyway...

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