flipthedolphin

What

Launchy is a freeware launcher. You bring it up with hotkeys, type the name (or part of it) of the application you wanna run and hit enter.

Why you need it

You don’t need it. You don’t even need a car to tell the truth. You can go from point A to point B simply walking, but it is usually faster to use cars. That’s exactly why you need Launchy: it will be faster to run your favourite software. Especially if you have a large amount of software installed.

I have more than 50 groups in my windows start menu. I have plenty of games, image editing softwares, communication softwares, multimedia players… freewares, sharewares… I’ve got ‘em all! It simply takes ages to scroll my entire start menu (and no, it isn’t in multicolumn mode as I found that it cut out some groups from the view).

Smart, Tiny and Fast

Now I simply

• press the ALT+SPACEBAR keys
• type “ph”
• hit the ENTER key to start photoshop.

And I simply type “s” to launch Skype or “i” to launch itunes. A sort of autocomplete feature.

This freeware app sort your softwares based on frequency of use. Let’s say I have quake 1,2 and 4 installed on my system (quake3 was crap). When I type “q” it shows me the last run quake. If I wanna refine my search I simply type “q4″ and it automatically select quake4 for me (or I could have used the arrow keys to select it from the dropdown menu). Smart.

It can be automatically loaded during windows startup since it is really tiny and the database of installed apps is generated at speed of light.

Competitors

There is only one true competitor: Colibri.

Colibri was the software I used to run before Launchy. It had a smoother look & feel but it took ages to generate the list of installed software everytime I started it. Launchy is immediate.

Also note that the colibri homepage is quite mysterious as you cannot find any help, any info on versions, any changelog, any forum… nothing.

Other softwares are either not freeware, slow, not actively developed or simply not cool enough.

Have fun being more productive with Launchy.