I found a neat keystroke application launcher for Windows called Launchy. It’s a little, lightweight application that appears when you hit a hotkey (the default is alt + SPACE). You begin typing in the application, document, or other file that you would like to “launch.” Launchy will search through the folders and file types that you have specified, and present you with the best match, followed by a series of other matches if the first one isn’t what you want. Launchy’s search process is intelligent, in that if you the same application all the time, it will come up after you type only one, or maybe two letters. For example “pu” brings up “putty”, “f” brings up “filezilla”, and “t” brings up “putty”, “ultravnc viewer”, and “thunderbird”.

I really like Launchy because I find it a gigantic pain to sort through all the Application entries in the Start Menu when I’m using a Windows computer with a lot of applications. Given the fact that the “All Programs” tab is typically really disorganized, I really like this alternative. Launchy is extremely efficient. I just hit the hotkey and within 2 seconds I’ve launched the application I wanted to. I don’t have to minimize my windows, or search through the start menu. It takes me about the same amount of time to open the start menu and navigate to the applications window as it does for me to launch pretty much every application.

For Ubuntu users, a similar launch like application appears when you hit “alt + F2.” I don’t really know much about Macs, but I think the Quicksilver application provides similar capabilities, although there might also be a default launch manager that I’m unaware of.