Squirrel HackerI have come forward in time from the year 1986 to share this with you

The keyboard has been proven to make you much faster at performing tasks. At least it has been said to be much faster, some people like your grandma may not be fast on the keyboard, but I am not sure that she really counts in the metric, she probably doesn’t use the computer to the extent that you do.

One thing that is annoying to have to do is look through the start menu for the application that you want to open to do what ever it is you want to do. That is why your desktop ends up looking like a cluttered mess, you have folder shortcuts, application shorcuts, stuff you just downloaded (shame on you for not having a downloads folder set up!), and temporary files that you create for something and then forget to delete. It all adds up to create a jumble that is at least as bad if not worse than looking through the start menu for that application that you want to open. In comes the quick start bar. That group of icons beside your start menu (in Windows, KDE, and Gnome), but what is the point of that if you end up filling it to the point of your start menu? You might as well not have it at all. Fortunately the people who designed the Windows Vista start menu realised this and added in a Search box, and fancy that, so did the guys in KDE land. The only problem with those search functions is that they attempt to do too much, first they search the start menu (which takes way too long in my opinion), and then if they find nothing, they offer to search the entire computer (at least Vista does, I am assuming that KDE does too). This takes even more time.

Enter Launchy. Launchy is a small program that runs in the background waiting for you to press the key combination that you set up (mine is win + space) it has already scanned the contents of your start menu, and/or any other location that you specify (it doesn’t have to look at your start menu… it could just be a specific folder on your computer) and it guesses, based on what you type, what program you want to run. If it can’t find what you want, you type in gibberish, or mistype, or specifically type in something you don’t have, you can make it default to searching google for what ever it was that you typed (by enabling the weby plugin and making the default search to be google).  Launchy will then open up your default browser and enter the search term into google and google will give you the results that you are looking for. The best part is that Launchy is free OS software that runs in Windows or Linux. So go get it now, you have nothing to lose by at least trying it out.