Long Nguyen

Launchy

Launchy is a very easy software to use. On the screenshot I am showing it, it is the little bar at the bottom in the middle.

People who don’t often use the mouse know that you can absolutely do almost everything only with the keyboard. With Launchy, everything gets a little faster.
When I have a hand on the mouse, I use the other hand to hit the Windows start menu as you can see and while I press the key, I move the mouse towards that list. It saves a lot of time. Instead of taking a second, it takes 1/10 of a second to run a progam.

When I didn’t use Launchy and both my hands were on the keyboard, I had to grab the mouse, but that is no longer necessary. Now I hit the shortcut key to bring up Launchy (by default it’s alt+space, but you can change it if you don’t like it) , I type a few letters, hit enter and the program I want launches. As you can see, if you don’t know what you want, Launchy lists everything that can be launched, so it’s easy to find what you want.

A very interesting feature is that it learns about you. To launch Firefox, the first time, I had to type in a few letters like “fire” before Launchy knew what I wanted. After only a few times, now, all I have to do is type f, hit enter and that’s it. It remembers what software you use most.
Unfortunately, it only runs on Windows, because the way it works is that it indexes everything in your start menu and since other operating systems don’t have a start menu…

By the way, it doesn’t just sit there on the screen. Once you hit enter to launch a program, it disappears until you bring it up again with a shortcut. The escape button also gets rid of it.