windows launcher?

thomasp

just wondering what everyone uses for a (keystroke) launcher on windows? i'm on windows 7 and find the start menu input thingy quite awful, also exceptionally well placed next to the shutdown button. bravo!

looking for something more useable and full-featured that can find executables all over the filesystem and pops up when a hotkey is pressed. basically Alfred from OSX (https://www.alfredapp.com/) is something i'd like to have an equivalent for on windows.

i know about launchy (http://www.launchy.net/) which seems to fit the bill but development has stopped years ago - still worth it - or is there something better?

Bek

If you've got a logitech keyboard their software might do what you need, but at least for me it only allows commands on the 'extra' keys.

If you only want to bind your common few programs, you could dock them on the taskbar and use win+# keys to launch them. I've no leads on any better third-party software for this though. For win 7/8 I used to just type the first few characters of the program I wanted and let search do the work; though that seems broken in win10 (some stuff will show up, other stuff won't, not sure if it's an indexing thing or what).

monster

If you are on Win7 Launchy is really awesome. I used to use it all the time. Works so much faster than mousing around.

These days though I just use Classic Shell (even in Win 7). You tap the Windows Key and the just start typing. Works like the default start menu but just a little bit better. The only two options I really change concerning launching are enabling "Search Box Selected By Default" and disable "Search The Internet".

thomasp

thanks guys, i'll give launchy a try then. was a bit hesitant seeing that it's last version is from 2010 or thereabouts.
another one i just remembered is called enso (https://github.com/GChristensen/enso-portable).