Occasional Thoughts

In this issue of App of the Whatever I'd like to present something for the other OS, called Windows (not related to X-Window or any Window Manager). Some might already have heard of it. No, don't try this, just because I mentioned it here. It's not worth it. But you know, some fellows are forced to use it just because some application vendors only support this system and some employers require their employess to use these apps. Well, it's not really a free world. Well to make it shorter... this Windows system is far from beeing as good as KDE. Even simple stuff, like the run dialog is hardly usable here. Mainly because all applications are spread over the whole hard disks and not organized in bin directories (it's really that way - I am not kidding!). So hardly any application is matched through the PATH variable.
But here is help: Launchy is somewhat similar to the Run dialog you are used from KDE. It searches the start menu folders and other configurable folders for application links and executables. Using a configurable hotkey (it even allows to leverage the Windows key - that's the key with the cute little penguin on some Cherry keyboards) you can pop up the very nice and themeable UI and type in the application name. The text you type in matches against any substring of the application (even better than the KDE run dialog). E.g. you can type 'zilla' to find 'Mozilla Firefox'. Launchy remembers the selection and sorts it by relevance, so the next time you type 'z' Launch selects the desired Firefox right away. However it only finds the applications in the configured folders (so no real replacement for a sane directory structure), but that's not in issue in most cases. And attention: Don't forget the hotkey ([Alt][Space] by default). You won't be able to bring the UI up once again you forgot the hotkey.