One of the features I liked in Google Desktop was the Quick search. Using this, I could quickly invoke the programs in the Start Menu, other than searching the files in my computer.
Colibri was a nice alternative to GD’s Quick Search. You can read more about Colibri here.
Launchy is another nice little open source tool to accomplish the same functionality.
Launchy is the most efficient way to open files, folders, and programs on your computer
The startup of the program is kind of weird in the sense that it hides in the background and there is no way to know that the program is running.
(Unlinke Launchy, Colibri sits in the taskbar to let you know that it is running in the background!)
Alt + Space invokes the Launchy widget.
By default Launchy indexes the start menu programs and control panel applets. You can also index folders, mp3’s, docs etc using “Directories” context menu option.
Also note that you can change the “Hotkey“ if it is conflicting with any other applications. The “Advanced“ option allows you to tweak few other settings of the application.
[Found via LifeHack]
Popularity: 3% [?]
{ 1 trackback }
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a great tool to which I am addicted for the past 5 months and this saves me time.
I love this tool, and the recent lifehacker article prompted me to pick up the new version and play with it some more.
I like how it integrates with Firefox bookmarks, although I have moved onto using Delicious recently – I wonder if there is some way of getting launchy to index over my Delicious tags ?
Ben,
Yes the latest version does have lot of more goodies.
As far as I know, launchy is able to index any data on your local drive, hence even firefox bookmarks are indexed.
However it doesn’t crawl the web as of now I guess
If you’re interested in more features or goodies, you should take a look at Keybreeze. It has way more features than Launchy. You can find it at keybreeze.com.