My Start Menu is appalling (yes, I do need that many programs installed, thank you very much!) and I have an obsession with keyboard shortcuts. I’ll seek help one day, I promise… but not yet. Not when there are fine programs out there like Launchy!
Even if you don’t suffer from the above afflictions, I reckon most of you could type the name (or part of the name) of an application quicker than you could find its shortcut in your Start Menu. And that is why you need Launchy. Not “could benefit from” or “might be interested in” or “would probably like”… NEED.
It goes like this:
- You want to start Notepad
- You hit the hotkey (the default is Alt-Space but you can change this)
- You type some of the letters that appear in the application’s name, eg “note”, “npd”, or if you’re really keen all of the letters “notepad”
- If it doesn’t show your application, you wait a moment and then select it from the list of matches
- You press Enter
- You feel overwhelming gratitude to Shayne for recommending such a wonderful application to you
It’s so much quicker, especially for applications that you don’t run all that often – there’s no point creating a Quick Launch or Desktop shortcut for them really is there? And speaking of other directories for shortcuts, you can tell Launchy to scan any directory you like, not just those of the Start Menu.
I like Find and Run Robot (F&RR) and Colibri too, but I love Launchy. It has the configurable directories of F&RR, the non-sequential-character searching (eg “npd” for Notepad) and sexy looks of Colibri but most importantly, it has the index-at-startup style of Colibri which means results appear much quicker; and yet it starts up so much quicker than Colibri… Glen, are you listening? 
Get Launchy. Righty nowy.
