I have blogged before about finding an alternative to Quicksilver (an OS X must-have application) for Windows. I tried a couple of free applications in the recent past but were soon removed from my system because they could not meet the standard raised by Quicksilver.

However, I recently found a referece to Launchy and my search has ended. Lauchy is not 100% like Quicksilver, there are many features missing but it meets my needs at the moment. I was looking for a solution that would allow me to quickly launch a program or folder with only a few keystrokes and certainly without much of a time delay.

Launchy by default will index your computer looking for shortcuts (.lnk files) but you can easily add more files types through the program’s options. You can also specify which locations within your machine should Launchy be looking for files to index, this was key to my desire to keep Launchy installed.

When working on a specific project, I usually keep going back to one folder within my machine or I need to access one of the network shares that I have acess to but I don’t recall the drive letter it was assigned. To help Launchy meet my needs, I created a folder Launchy Locations within the My Documents folder, I added this location to Launchy’s menu to make sure it is indexed. In the launchy locations folder, I place shortcuts to the folders that I need quick access to from launchy. I also rename these shortcuts with the names that I want to use within the launcher.

Download Launchy!