Picture this: You are in the middle of typing something in your editor and suddenly you realize the whole thing would be a lot more pleasant if you had some music on. So to open Winamp, you minimize all your open windows and then you find there’s no Winamp shortcut on your desktop because you didn’t want to clutter it. And so you take your hand off the keyboard, move it all the way to your mouse, then click on Start > Program Files, and then start searching for the entry which says Winamp. Way too much trouble to do all this whenever you want to launch anything, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just type, say Win + W and have Winamp come up? Launchy may not be able to do that, but it certainly makes application launching a lot less painful.

Here’s how: Launchy indexes all your installed programs and starts during your system start-up, so when you want to launch an application, all you have to do is press Alt + Space (or any other key combination of your choice) and type in the first few letters of your application. Press enter and voila! Your application has been launched!

Launchy also comes with a bunch of plugins that help you do more. For example, the installer comes with plugins that index control panel applications and let you use launcy as a calculator, browse files and more. Lifehacker provides good articles on Launchy here and here. It comes with a bunch of skins too, though I think the default one is good enough for me.

Happy Launching!