The WISIWYG Blog

Every DOTA player in our office knows how powerful Alt + Tab is.  When they hear someone coming up the stairs while they are playing, they just press Alt + Tab and wallah, they can again pretend to work with the Visual Studio window open.  But DOTA-ignorant as I am, and add being an honest employee to that (8-}), I don’t have much use for the Alt + Tab key combination, except if I have to browse through the different windows running on my desktop all at the same time.  But I do use one Alt + combination often.  The Alt + Space combination. 

Now, for those of you who are fond of visiting GTD or lifehack websites (or for those who simply knows what I’m talking about), you must already have an idea of what I’m saying.  I’m talking about the keystroke combination for launching Launchy, a free and open source application launcher.  It’s so powerful that it can, uhm, launch applications!  (Another 8-}).

Launch Apps with a few keystrokes…

So what happens after you hit the Alt + Space combination?  The Launchy application appears, and from there on, you can launch about almost any application you want to use.  Just key-in a few letters on the Launchy user interface and the helper app will give you the application with the closest match to those letters that you keyed in.  So should you wish to open the Microsoft Word application, just key-in “wo” and the helper app would immediately present to you the application through its sleek UI.  Press the enter key from there and the application you selected opens.

But what if the application you were looking for was not what Launchy gave you after a few keystrokes?  Well, give the helper app a few seconds and it will list down the other applications that matched your query.  Say you wanted to open Wordpad instead of Microsoft Word after you entered “wo”, just wait for a few seconds after keying in the letters and a list of other applications having “wo” in its name will be displayed, including Wordpad of course.  Using the up and down buttons on your keyboard, select the application that you want to open from the list, press enter and the application launches.

… And more

Launchy does not only launch applications, it can also open a lot of other things.  Your MyDocuments folder, a text file, an excel file—name it and if it is in your computer, Launchy can probably open it.  A little tweaking may be needed though to launch particular files and executables.  But most of the tinkering can be done easily through the application’s Option menu, which can be easily accessed by right-clicking on the application and clicking on the Option label from the popup submenu that appears.  From the Launchy options window, additional applications and files that you want Launchy to handle can be added by accessing the “Catalog” tab. 

If you don’t like the appearance of the user interface, there are selectable skins that you can use to replace the default, all of which are accessible through the same Launchy options window by clicking on the “Skins” tab.  And to configure the primary appearance and settings of the helper application, just play with the options on the “General” child window.

Aside from opening files that resides on your hard disk, you can also use Launchy to automatically search for a keyword in Google.  Just key-in google, then press the tab button, enter your search keyword and press enter.  The helper app would then launch your default web browser and display the Google search result.  Aside from Google, you can also make keyword queries from other sites, including msn, wikipedia, yahoo, and others.

Clean Desktop

If there’s one more thing that I like about Launchy aside from launching programs and what-else-there-may-be lightning-fast, it’s how the application allows me to maintain a squeaky clean desktop.  On my work PC’s desktop, you can see nothing but my desktop wallpaper, a couple of reminders that I embedded on the desktop with the aid of Samurize, and a few links to work folders (which I still cannot configure to be launched by Launchy at post time) lined-up neatly on one side.  The desktop of my home laptop is nothing different, minus the reminders that I wouldn’t need while relaxing at home.

The Verdict

I love it!  With fewer mouse clicks and folder searches, it makes launching any PC application an ease to me.  And it keeps my desktop clean.  And one more thing… it makes anyone who goes near my PC give out a woaaahhh or an ehhhh whenever they see me launching an application.  Hehe. Nonsense!  Well, that’s all for now, unless you want to hear more nonsense from me. :p

And by the way, you can download the Launchy helper application here.