This is how my Start Menu looks like after reinstalling Windows XP just 1 month plus ago. I like to try out programs I gathered from the web, and now it has more than 120 menu items chucked in, so you can probably imagine how it will become down the road – totally useless! Therefore I’ve opt to not use it anymore. To replace it, I am using this nifty little tools called Launchy to launch all my applications (and more). Check out the video below to see just how much faster you can use it to launch your program with just one hotkey, plus a keystroke or two.

 

In the video, I pressed the special Ctrl-Space hotkey (configurable) to bring up the Launchy screen. Then I search for the Microsoft Outlook programs by just typing ‘OU’. All programs with ‘OU’ as part of its name will be listed. I then press ENTER to launch Outlook. Next I start Microsoft Word by typing in ‘Word’. Again, a list of matching program names are short-listed for my selection. The next one is super-fast. I just typed in ‘f’, and Launchy automatically finds Firefox for me, because that’s my most used programs with ‘F’ in front of its name. In other words, Launchy actually make a pretty good guess based on how frequent I’ve used any programs! The last one’s quite handy – you can use Launchy to quickly open up documents you frequently use, and in my case, it’s the office contact list. I no longer need to hunt around my desk to look for that printed copy anymore!

Below are the settings I’ve included in the Catalog screen (besides the default ones which points to the Start Menu folder):

1. *.exe in C:\Program files. This let me search for all EXE files which I’ve installed manually in the Program files folder which doesn’t exist in my Start Menu.

2. *.doc?, *.xls?, and *pdf in ‘My Document\Office’ folder. This will let me search for all my office related documents (for e.g. the contact list). You may have noticed that I put a question mark (?) behind the ‘doc’ which let me include both *.doc and *.docx files. Same applies to the ‘xls?’ file extension.

 

In the next post, I will show you more Launchy’s capabilities. Besides Launchy, Google Desktop also provide the similar functionality, but I don’t prefer its somewhat bloated footprint. There is also another tools called Executor which you may want to check out, but I really like Launchy’s plugin capability, so I’m sticking to it now.