I pipe a list of installed programs into dmenu and have it run whichever one I select. I have this bound to Mod+p. dmenu has fuzzy search, so if I want to open firefox I can just type `Mod+p fox <cr>`. Not quite as fast as having dedicated hotkeys, but it also covers all installed programs on the system (or some small subset if I want).

Having programs available from anywhere with just a few keystrokes makes everything feel very accessible. Whenever I want to run something I just need to type a few characters of the binaries name to launch it.

I use a similiar set up for ssh, where I pipe the Hosts from my ~/.ssh/config into dmenu and only need to type part of the hostname to connect.

[dmenu] http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/