I work with someone from OCI who has noted that there are a finite number of keystrokes within his fingers, so every one needs to count. This leads us geeky developer-types to take advantage of shortcuts within our IDEs and frequently-used programs. I have found an application that extends this mindset seamlessly into the Windows OS. It has made my use of Windows extremely fast. In fact, while pair programming or demonstrating something, more than one other programmer has seen me use this tool and asked something along the lines of “What was that thing you just used to open [some program] so quickly?”.
So I’ll tell you.
Launchy is probably the most useful free Windows productivity application I’ve ever downloaded. I use it all the time, sometimes hundreds of times a day. From the
Launchy 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!
For my first example, compare the following methods of opening Firefox, assuming your hands are where they should be… on the keyboard:
| Without Launchy |
- Remove right hand from keyboard.
- Move mouse cursor to either:
- Firefox desktop shortcut
- Firefox quicklaunch icon
- Start –> All Programs –> Mozilla –> Firefox
- Click mouse button.
|
| With Launchy |
- Type: Alt+Space, fire, Enter
|
Bookmarks
Even better, Launchy indexes all my bookmarks so I can just type “
Alt+Space, danlog, Enter” to bring up my weblog. Launchy keeps track of your most recently used applications and tries to guess which one you mean when you type “
danlog“.
Media
You can also tell Launchy which directories it needs to index, and what types of files to index. So you can put all your MP3’s in your music directory at your fingertips. Want to listen to
Beercan by
Beck, just type “
Atl+Space, beercan, Enter“, and it pops up in your default MP3 player.
Navigation
Also use Launchy to navigate to the most-used locations in your file directory. I have a folder that Launchy keeps indexed where a bunch of shortcuts exists (Windows .lnk files). So if I want to go to my Eclipse workspace, there is a workspace.lnk within that folder, so I can just type “
Alt+Space, work, Enter” to bring the folder up.
Scripts
Some of the most useful things I’ve done with Launchy include custom
batch programming. There are some Ant tasks for projects I’m working on that I tend to run all the time, so I have written some very simple batch scripts and placed them into Launchy’s index. Now I can just type “
Alt+Space, report, Enter” to open up a command window, navigate to my project folder, and run “ant report” from the command line.
Anything!
You can put any folder into Launchy’s index and have it look and attempt to execute any file type. It will open data or media files with the default program if one is specified. I’ve even put my Windows “recent” link within the index so I can bring up all my recent files with a few keystrokes.
If you are concerned about how many keystrokes you have left in your fingers, I urge you to check out
Launchy.
Links
4 Comments
I’m a big fan of Bash and its aliasing for the same reason (key strokes/productivity).
At first glance, this seems like Bash aliasing on hyper-drive… I’m definitely going to check it out. Thanks for the heads-up!
When I used a Sun at work, I aliased the crap out of everything. Did you know that aliases were introduced in the C-shell? I don’t think even the korn shell had aliases.
I used to navigate with the csh, but write all my scripts in plain old bourne shell, because I was working with such old technology that it wasn’t safe to assume the scripts would be ported to a system that had a korn shell.
Great app, isn’t it? My Firefox launch is even more efficient than your example - it’s just Alt+Space, fx, Enter. I find it so difficult to do without now, that I put a copy on my USB stick and set it to be portable.
That is something that I haven’t had the inclination to do yet. Maybe I’ll give it a try. Thanks for the comment!
2 Trackbacks
[...] So I am still looking for something that will work as well as Launchy on my Ubuntu install. I’ve tried Gnome Deskbar-applet with no success yet; I’ve also tried Katapult, but it won’t pick up the hotkeys (Alt+Space should launch it). I think I may have problems with my hotkeys all around on the laptop with Ubuntu, because my Gmail hotkeys won’t work either. So that is the main thing I have to research right now. [...]
[...] filesystem, but they lack meat. You can’t do much else with them. And the way I use them with Launchy, all I want to do is put them somewhere that Launchy can find them and give them a catchy name [...]