Oh how you won my heart
from thee I shall never part.
Forever shall I win the prize
As you my programs organize.
Never have I written poetry about software. In fact, to your benefit, I don’t think I ever will again. But I truly can’t live without this freeware tool. Why, you ask?
This is what my Start menu looks like:
I have absolutely no motivation or desire whatsoever to go through all of these folders and consolidate them into more useful folders. I have done this far too many times and haven’t enjoyed it very much. But with this size start menu, I usually find programs faster by going straight to their folders in explorer.
Enter Launchy.
Launchy allows you to quickly search for the program you want to run by pressing a keyboard shortcut key (alt-space by default). It is an incremental search that gives you results instantaneously. So, to run PeerGuardian 2, for instance, all I do is press alt-space, type ‘peer’ and press enter. Voila. No endless start menu searching.
I am aware that other tools accomplish similar tasks (Google desktop, for instance). But I like the simplicity and visual style of Launchy more than any other tool I’ve tried.
The main problem now is that I hit alt-space every time I want to run something. Unfortunately not everyone has Launchy installed, so I inevitably just get a context menu of some sort instead of what I wanted. Oh well. But that is why I’m writing this…so you can get it too!
Screenshots:
