SQJ Taipei

I’ve been using this little program for a while and it has become one that I feel like I can’t live without. Of course, I *could* live without it… but I think you know what I mean…

Launchy: The Open Source Keystroke Launcher for Windows

From the website:

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Josh Karlin (creator)

I love to use the keyboard over the mouse… if you learn to do so, you’ll be amazed at how much faster it is than taking your hands from the keyboard… grabbing the mouse… and navigating to the (usually) small button or area you need to click. I use WINDOWS KEY + M about 50 times a day to minimize all windows.

I use Launchy a lot to… well… LAUNCH programs (and many other things)

I have it set up to index all of my music folders too.

Here’s how it works…

Open Launchy with a hotkey combo. The default is ALT + SPACE and that works for me so I’ve never changed it. You can change it to whatever you want though. You can also change the color of the bar that pops up so if you don’t like my orange folder tab thingy… you can change it. I did… the default is something else.

If I want to run Quicktime, I just hit ALT + SPACE to activate LAUNCHY then start typing Q - U - I -C - K - T - I - M - E. You can see in this screencap that Launchy is guessing what you want as you type. In this case… its first guess is “About Quicktime” which isn’t what I want… but as I type it will actually give you a list of items that it guesses you are looking for. Quicktime Player is the 2nd item on that list… so I just hit the down arrow 2 times and then ENTER when I get to that item in the list.

But here’s the cool part… Launchy will adapt its guesses based on what you chose in the past… so… here’s what it does the next time I use it to launch Quicktime. I just type “q” and it guesses that I want Quicktime… I just hit ENTER and Quicktime launches. Sweetness. You can also see in the screenshot that the secondary guesses were a couple images named twquake2 and twquake3 because they have a “q” in the name.

So… Launchy won’t always pick what you want the first time you try to launch with it… but it learns VERY quickly and you’ll rapidly get to where you just activate launchy and type one or 2 letter or numbers and hit enter to get what you want.

If I want to listen to The 77’s, I activate Launchy and type “77″ and enter and the entire folder of 77’s tunes opens.

Launchy will automatically index the items in your startmenu when you install it. If you want it to index your music or pictures or any other folders, you just need to point it to those directories. You can also have it index just certain types of files… .mp3 or .doc or .avi or whatever.

So… Launchy helps me and you might find it helpful too. If you have any questions about it, I’d be happy to help you.

Here’s the download link again:
Launchy: The Open Source Keystroke Launcher for Windows