crankygeek

(This one is for Difranco because it’s Mac-ish)

Since I’ve been dabbling in Mac-land, I’ve been using the must-have Quicksilver as an app launcher. It does tons of other amazing stuff, but I haven’t gotten far enough into it yet.

QS is keyboard driven. Enter the keyboard shortcut to launch the interface, then type in a few letters to find the app you want, then hit enter. It’s much easier than digging around in the Applications folder in the Finder and it’s even easier to use that Windows’ Start menu.

When I found myself trying to launch QS on Windows to start an app, I knew I had a problem.

Fortunately for me, there are a lot of Mac users out there who are always looking for a QS equivalent on Windows. Though there isn’t one, there are several apps that get mentioned as replacements to at least launch apps. The one I settled on was the SourceForge project, Launchy. 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!

You can index pretty much any directory, it doesn’t have to be just your Start menu (though that’s all I’m using it for right now).

I definitely give it two thumbs up and think it’s worth any power user’s time to give it a try. It’s a little odd at first, but once you get used to using it, using another computer that doesn’t have it will be very irritating. To me, that’s a pretty good judge of how good a utility is.