Superfast application launching with Launchy!

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!

Tabbed Browsing for your Folders

There are some of us out there who feel that the days before tabbed browsing was discovered, the world was a sad, sad place. It’s almost like going back to the stone ages. The way tabbed browsing has simplified managing our open websites is truly amazing. This made me reflect sadly on the fact that we can’t do such a thing with our Windows file manager (I’m talking about XP here. I have no clue what Vista offers). So often it happens that we have so many folders open that our taskbar is completely cluttered with them. Managing those open windows is more trouble than it is worth.

And that set me thinking. How wonderful it would be if the folders I open just open inside a tab and not a separate window. It would make the job of managing them really simple. As it turns out, there are some ways you can do it. Here are a couple of them:

• Chuck your default file manager and use a new one. Try Xplorer2.
• Use your web browser to open folders. In fact, in IE if you type a path in the address bar, it will open the folder right there. Firefox does too, but the interface is really bad. Type c: in both IE and Firefox and you’ll see what I mean. So I suppose using IE7, which has tabbed browsing, pretty much solves the problem. But for people who prefer firefox, you might want to install this add-on. It brings the native windows look when you open folders in firefox. Here’s how it will look:

So that’s one problem solved. But all this makes me wonder why there should be two different things called web browsers and file managers. Why can’t there be one elegant interface to both?