Show HN: Keypirinha, a new semantic launcher for keyboard ninjas | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Keypirinha, a new semantic launcher for keyboard ninjas

keypirinha.com

9 pointspolyvertex16 comments

What advantages does this have over the well-known Launchy [0] which accomplishes the same tasks but multi-platform? You may want to touch upon any improvements if you want to win anyone (namely: me) over.

I tried to read through the Configuration section and found nothing about limiting the scope of the search. For example, if I put .shortcut files into a certain directory, let's say `K:\Programs` and only want to use Keypirinha to quickly run those shortcuts. I find Launchy is finicky with updating its library for this purpose and often requires a bit of adding/removing/restarting/telling it to rescan before it finally picks up on additions/removals. I see nothing about limiting Keypirinha's searching scope.

I appreciate that you anticipate users may move the .exe outside of the install directory. Too many people expect APP_EXE to be within APP_DIR, thank you for not making that assumption. :)

Also the most important question: can the keybind be left alt + space? Or are there any keybind limitations that so many programs have that don't allow key modifiers to be bound with space? (E: Answer is `yes`, mentioned in Config file)

[0] http://www.launchy.net/

I've been a long time and happy user of Launchy. It's a great tool and you might have noticed the small tribute to it in Keypirinha by using the term "Catalog" to name its internal database :)

Keypirinha is more modern than Launchy in many ways and integrates better in recent Windows platforms (for example I've had troubles due to 64-bit platforms with Launchy; items not found or not launchable, ...). The search accuracy is very much improved as well. You can have machine and/or user-specific configuration in a portable way. In addition to that, Keypirinha is more easily extensible, it embeds a Python interpreter to load its plugins (whereas you had to compile a C++ plugin to do the same job with Launchy; I wasn't happy with the unofficial Launchy-Python plugin). That gives the user the power to modify the existing official plugins (they are open-source), or to create new plugins that fit her needs (that slowly leads us towards your "searching scope" question).

Keypirinha is also very young compared to venerable Launchy so its plugins catalog has yet to be "flourished".

Hope that answers your question regarding Keypirinha vs. Launchy.

Regarding the "searching scope" question, please follow the discussion on GitHub at: https://github.com/Keypirinha/Keypirinha/issues/3

Check out Wox - an open source launcher like Alfred for Windows with plugin support. http://www.getwox.com

Wox offers more exotic features, but to be fair is also way less efficient when it comes to search accuracy, speed, memory footprint and battery friendliness.

Website looks clean, loads fast and is very informative, so props for that. Are you using a static generator (Pelican perhaps)?

Looking at the source I think he's using Sphinx (Python static generator) with the RTD theme, or some variation.

That's right, with the vanilla ReadTheDocs theme (no variation).

Site and documentation written in reST and built with Sphinx. Details: http://keypirinha.com/#about-this-documentation

Thanks for the nice feedback :)

Kind of pointless since these days, Win + "typing" does exactly the same thing.

You can write plugins for the start menu as well?

Thanks for pinning one of the points of Keypirinha :)

Incorrect! You don't get the benefits of Keypirinha's scoring system, which makes it far more efficient than Windows' native feature. Also, if you wish to perform more exotic tasks like launching a PuTTY/FileZilla/WinSCP session directly, you would be on your own.

Nothing beats Everything.

Different purpose. Everything rocks at finding files and is complementary to Keypirinha, which rocks at adapting to your needs. As explained in an other comment, Keypirinha is way more than about launching apps and documents.

...on Windows.

Sorry I forgot to mention that. More precisely: Windows 64-bit (Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 or 10)

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