Launch Your Programs With Launchy

Launchy is a nice little utility that makes life easier, especially for all those users who prefer the keyboard to the mouse, say laptop users to whom typing a few keys is more convenient that navigating using the mouse.

It runs in the background and when invoked to the foreground allows you to launch various programs that you wish. There are a few similar apps like Colibri and yLaunch, but Launchy stands out for the wide range of features that can be customized.

To start with, the hotkey used to invoke Launchy can be set. I choose “Win + Space” instead of the default “Alt + Space” because the latter is already a keyboard shortcut to invoke the Restore menu. GUI options like opacity and fade times, length of suggestion lists; system options like time between catalog updates; skins are also customizable.

Coming to the catalog, the user can set the file types to be catalogued, directories to catalogue them from, and the maximum depth in each directory up to which cataloguing is to be done. Once the catalog is indexed for the first time, you are good to go. Suggestions as to which file you want to open are at your fingertips.

I only catalog my Start->Programs list for various reasons. I keep my PC quite organized, especially the Program files, and I use a different indexer for indexing all files on the system (which I’ll write about on next Friday).

Another great feature of Launchy is the plugins.

Apart from opening websites directly from the browser through Launchy, all your bookmarks and other commonly-used websites can be added for quick direct searches; it can directly use the calculator and the Google calculator,…

Let me not go on and on and rob you the pleasure of discovering this little app. You can download it from http://launchy.net and when you install it, you also get a well-written README, so there you go.

If you really like it, buy a cup of coffee to Josh Karlin, the one behind Launchy. Show your support to open source.