Become more productive by freeing yourself of the start menu or having to navigate to your Desktop to bring up your favorite programs. Launchy is an open source keystroke launcher for Windows which allows you to execute any program, Internet shortcut, music file, document, and anything.

To start Launchy, hit the customizable hotkey ALT+SPACE to begin. Simply start typing what you want to "Launch" and Launchy will search through the items it has indexed. Don’t remember exactly the name of what you are looking for? Launchy will suggest items for you. Hit ENTER once you have found what you want. If you "Launch" certain items more than others, Launchy will weight them differently so the next time those items will be suggested first.

The customization options for Launchy are endless. Click the cog-options-wheel (or Rt-Click > Options) to access the Options window. Launchy will automatically index your Firefox and IE bookmarks and your "Start Menu" shortcuts. In the Catalog tab, you can add your "My Documents" folder and instruct it to only index your .doc, .xls, and .pdf files. Changing the Launchy hotkey, the skin, the opacity is just as easy.

Try out the plugin "Weby" by bringing up Launchy and typing:

google TAB Scroggles!

This will search Google for "Scroggles!". By pressing TAB after the item Launchy will let you pass in a search parameter. Check out the plugin "Weby" for more shortcuts (Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon…). Additionally, Launchy can be used to pass in a command "parameter" to the Command Prompt or instruct Putty (a SSH client) to connect to a particular server.

It is similar to Windows Vista’s new Start Menu live search feature, but is way more powerful.

Quicksilver for Mac OSX is the inspiration behind this software. Gnome-Do is an awesome launcher for Linux.

Have you had a go at Launchy, Quicksilver, or Gnome-Do? Tell us about it.