Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

Product Review: Launchy

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!

I find it hard to describe this little program called “Launchy” which I have been using for the past week and found it to have revolutionized the way I work.

It is in a nutshell a “program launcher”. That’s a pretty broad description. Think of it as a replacement for your windows start button - once you have Launchy, you’ll never need it again.

This is how it works. First of all, you invoke Launchy by hitting alt-space on the keyboard. The Launchy window will then appear for you to key in what you want to launch. So if you key in “F. I”, it will begin displaying the programs that match what you want.

I take it another step further and ask Launchy to peer into the “My documents” folder. Here’s where I really make it productive. I can make Launchy drill into my files and pull up “China” or “Malaysia” folders instantly. And then there’s a set of excel files that I use to track stuff named “Pending.xls”, “In-Progress.xls” and “Issues.xls” which can be started up from Launchy. Hell I don’t even bother remembering which folders I store stuff in anymore.

Did any of that make sense to you?

Download Launchy and try it out for yourself to see how much more productive you can get!

It’s just like Spotlight in Mac OSX and Quicksilver. To name a few.