Wednesday, November 9th, 2005
While my normal computing platform of choice is Mac OS X, I do end up using Windows at work. On OS X, I really love the quick-launching abilities of LaunchBar and QuickSilver, so naturally I’m always on the look-out for similar launcher utilities for Windows.
Launchy is a promising start. It was written for fun by a guy who just wanted it for himself, then shared it with friends, then shared it with the world. Despite being so young, it has three of the best features I deem necessary in this strain of program:
- blazing fast speed
- almost non-existant UI (it only shows up with a keyboard command, Alt+Space)
- partial pattern matching (typing “mword” matches “Microsoft Word”)
I would be very happy if only someone could add a bit of:
- manual match tuning
- learning (remember manually tuned matches)
- custom matching (I want to launch stuff that is not in the Start menu)
As for now, I ran it for a few days, but ultimately turned it off.
