Use Launchy 2.5 and Forget Your Windows Start Menu | Hacker News Reader

Use Launchy 2.5 and Forget Your Windows Start Menu

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14 pointsraja3c19 comments

Am I the only person that actually prefers an old school taskbar + launch panel to the various dock systems available today?

I prefer to actually see text containing the window title as well as an icon so I can easily distinguish between the different stuff I have open without having to hover/click on a dock.

It's a much more document focused flow rather than being based on what applications I have open.

This is one of the reasons I prefer gnome2 over anything more recent and want to stick with it as long as possible.

Blogspam. Wikipedia's page on Launchy is more useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchy

Launchy has been around a long time and it's one of the first apps I usually install on my Windows machines. I know Windows 7 does a good job now of launching apps but I still prefer Launchy.

It can remember what you chose with the least amount of characters entered (I just type 'pro' for projects folder, 'w' for MS Word, 'f' for firefox, etc.). I use it a lot for quick math calculations and it can be configured to do all sorts of things like start a Putty session to a specific server. On my mac I use Alfred for similar functionality.

I'm a long time user of Launchy. For me it's a must have app for Windows.

The things I like about Launchy are: 1. Launchy searches program faster 2. Very easy to open folder E[tab]pro[tab]fl[tab]travel[enter] opens E:\projects\flash\travelling_salesman for me 3. Built in calculator. so I can type (1 + 198/24) * ( 254/222) and get the result quickly. Too bad the calculator is not advanced enough. For example: no sin(x), no power, etc

Used to use Launchy loads a few years ago, brilliant little program, moved on the Executor http://executor.dk/ for a bit more power (keyboard shortcuts specifically). Launchy may have updated to compete since then though.

I think this program could be particularly useful for Windows 8 and it's lack of start menu.

>I think this program could be particularly useful for Windows 8 and it's lack of start menu.

You can just start typing on the start screen to search. All the previous shorcut keys also work.

http://nativeblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/24.jpg

Under Windows 7 (and I think Windows 8 as well), I can just type [Start][w][o][r][d][Enter] and bring up word. How is this better?

I have found Launchy to be faster than the Start menu method. Also, Launchy learns from your behavior, so if you type [w][o] into Launchy and then select "Word", it will know in the future that [w][o] should bring up Word first.

I don't know for sure since, like you, this is basically how I open apps. But recently I was told from a friend of mine that you can also enter arguments with launchy. My friend had a link to a website and launchy would let him then enter some text which it would put what he typed into a parameter in the url. For example:

http://intranetsite/stores?id={0}

then entering "45" in launchy after selecting the url would let him go to the site for store 45.

There are plugins, one for example, so I can type putty[tab]servername. You can also index more locations than your start menu. I index a common shared documentation space, and can easily open files by typing their name.

I've been using Humanized Enso for years. The killer feature for me is it's "quasi-modal" behavior.

1. Hold down caps-lock. 2. Type 'open PROGRAM' 3. Let go of caps-lock.

I like it over launchy but it has a lot of bugs.

My two favorite features are switching between windows/firefox tabs by name and that it's extensible with Python.

Too bad it's not maintained anymore since it crashes a lot. Enso's opensource rewrite, Community Enso, stops working or randomly closes which makes it a pain to use too.

I used enso for a few years because it was lighting fast and the minimalism appealed to me. Ultimately though I switched to launchy for the additional power and also because its not derelict.

I found the program indispensable when I was using Windows XP but since moving on to Windows 7 I haven't felt the need to use it.

I still use it because it pulls up results significantly faster than the start menu's search bar on my machine.

For those of you that use OSX, Alfred is your man.

been using it for a while. has a few annoying quirks, but overall i love it.

Windows? Who uses that?

ha ha ...

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