shahine.com/omar/

For a long time I’ve searched the web looking for a great application launcher for Windows. Mac users have QuickSilver, the holy grail of application launchers. In fact I’ve never used QuickSilver, I always read about its awesomeness.

First there was SlickRun and I used it for many years. In fact I loved SlickRun (and still do). However, it’s not a general purpose launcher and will not index your hard drive for applications, folders and whatnot. It will let you define some great keywords though.

Then there was Launchy. A great launcher but it lacked the ability to create Keywords like SlickRun. The UX was slick though.

I’ve tried SkyLight (from the makers of AppRocket), a beautiful application, but dog slow. I mean painfully slow (it would take a few seconds before it would allow me to type a command. SkyLight is a WPF app and to be honest, I’ve found that all the WPF apps I’ve tried have similar performance problems (Witty and bTT).

Executor

At long last, Executor added support to index any folder you specify on your computer, allowing me to replace both Launchy and SlickRun. I tried Executor last year but the inability to customize it with your own search paths was limiting since I store little utilities in my roaming portable apps folder.

Executor has a lot of functionality. It took me a while to set up the UX and behavior the way I wanted. Here is a screen shot of what you’d see if you typed “ad” into Executor:

As you can see, I use the large 2 line icon view, which is helpful if you use Executor to index your Documents folder for Folders and you have more than 1 with the same name:

And of course you can use it as a general file system browser… much better than Start –> Run.

With Vista we all get a nice solution to the Start Menu Mess, as Jeff Atwood describes in his post Typing Trumps Pointing. While this is a great solution for my parents, I personally need the power of defining custom keywords and search paths (like my Portable Apps directory).

Executor has a lot of features, so I’d recommend you check out this page which lists some of the cool things you can do.