In issue #154 I gave my hearty endorsement to three freeware application launchers: Launchy [1], Find and Run Robot [2] and Enso [3]. However, subscriber Ryan Reif has suggested yet another program:
"Gizmo, I have been a user of program launchers for a while. My first was a purchased version of AppRocket but after lack of updates I switched to Launchy. Recently though I shifted to Keybreeze [4] and found it is superior. First of all it is very fast. Secondly, it provides many configurable options to change how it functions and appears. The list of supported features [5] is impressive and is even larger than my Gnome-Do launcher for Linux. Impressive ones include automatically opening typed websites in a preferred browser (it includes my favorite, Opera, as an option as well) as well as quick searches, user defined macros, looking up movie times, notes, reminders, inserting commonly typed text into programs and has a smaller memory footprint than Launchy. I have not tried Enso because the options do not look to be as extensive as Keybreeze, and a see no benefits at the moment for using it. For a computer enthusiast like me who loves streamlined feature rich programs, Keybreeze is sure to stay installed for a while."
Nice find Ryan. It sure is fast and very full-featured, and if you want even more features there’s a Professional version available for $14.95. However, Launchy is more attractive to the eye and has better indexing of files and folders, while Enso is, for me, more flexible.
All these free launchers are great products, so it’s more a case of choosing the product best suited to your needs rather than nominating "the best." Me, I’ll stick with Enso.
Keybreeze: Free for non-commercial use, All Windows versions, Portable version available, 3.31MB.
[1] http://www.launchy.net/
[2] http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun
[3] http://www.humanized.com/enso/launcher/
[4] http://www.keybreeze.com
[5] http://www.keybreeze.com/featurelist.htm
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