A few days ago Brian introduced me to a little piece of software called Launchy that has quickly displaced my Windows Vista Start Menu Search. It is much quicker than searching with the Vista start menu and has a lot more features.
It’s like a smart Run window (you know, the window that pops up when you click Start…Run in Windows), where you can do a bunch of different things with it depending on what plugins you have installed. For instance, if I want to quickly check the Weather:
Alt+Space (to bring up Launchy), type “weather <tab> 62712” to go to weather.com for the 62712 zip code.
Ever need to do some simple arithmetic, but are annoyed by having to open Calculator?
Alt+Space (to bring up Launchy), just type in the math you want to do and the calculator plugin will give you the answer.
It’s also great for opening programs, just start typing the application name. It’ll also learn what you launch most so it’ll take less and less typing as time goes on. It’s even pretty looking, and stays out of your way:
It’s Open Source and available free of charge, check it out! It was designed for XP and makes no mention on the website about Vista, but works as designed.
The Johnson Blog 
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6 responses to “Launchy”
Sweet. I’ll have to check it out.
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Slickrun didn’t do it for you, huh?
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I haven’t ever heard of slickrun. I just went to their website and it makes no mention of having a hotkey to activate it – does it have one? I HATE having to take my hands away from the keyboard to select a window, to then type what I want.
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NEWSFLASH: Brian just purchased someoneneedsablog.com!
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I downloaded Launchy today. Pretty sweet program, and faster than Windows search. Thanks for the recommendation.
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Slickrun comes bound to Windows+Q by default. Otherwise, it just sits wherever you leave it, on top, which you can disable. When not being used, it displays the time and date, so I leave it over the date/time in the system tray, which is handy since I set my taskbar to auto-hide for a litte more usable real estate (esp. on laptops).
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