This guide will provide you with a few slightly advanced tips and tricks for using the application launcher “Launchy”.
Launchy is a open-source keystroke launcher for Windows (up to and including Windows 10) covered briefly here last month. Here are some advanced tricks I’ve found for Launchy.
Custom Search Tips for Launchy
For the following search tips you’ll need to access the “Weby” plugin. You can find it by opening Launchy and clicking the Options button (the one that looks like a “cog” – see screenshot below).
Select the Plugins tab from the top and Weby from the list of plugins.
1. Site-specific search
This one is relatively simple and works with most sites. Visit a site, locate it’s search area and search for something like the word test. When you get the URL of the search results, replace the word test with %1 and add it as a Weby action.
Using Reddit as an example, I searched for the word test ended up at https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=test so in Launchy I would put the name as Reddit and the URL as https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=%1
You’ll need to rescan the Launchy catalog to add your new custom Weby search (go to Options and select the Catalog then click the Rescan Catalog button). Now open Launchy and type Reddit, hit the Tab key and then enter a search phrase and finally, hit the return key.
Your default browser will launch and open a new tab with the search results for that site.
2. Gmail Search
This one I picked from LifeHacker – you can use the Weby plugin in Launchy to quickly search your Gmail.
2021 Update: for some reason this one stopped working some time ago. I’ve searched far and wide to come up with a fix and for the life of me I’m stumped. If you have any suggestions please leave a comment below.
Once again open the Launchy Options by clicking the “cog” button.
Select the Plugins tab from the top and Weby from the list of plugins.
Click the “+” (plus sign) button and in the Name field enter Gmail and then the URL field enter:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/%1
Rescan your Launchy catalog and then try it out – open Launchy and type Gmail, hit the Tab key, and then type in a search phrase.
3. Quick directory search:
If your company or school has a simple directory search you may be able to use webby to search it quickly, this works similar to site-specific but you can make multiple queries to search different fields. So if when you search for a name on the site you get something like:
http://www.companywebsite.com/directory/index.php?txt_name=test&txt_jobtitle=&txt_phone=&Submit=Submit
You can make a Weby query with:
Name = WName, URL = http://www.companywebsite.com and Query = /directory/index.php?txt_name=%s&txt_jobtitle=&txt_phone=&Submit=Submit
Now the sneaky part, if your company phone shows the extension and you can search by extension, you can now make your own callerID. I would make the name for this something you can remember and type quickly for example W#, so you would have:
Name = W#, URL = http://www.companywebsite.com and Query = /directory/index.php?txt_name=&txt_jobtitle=&txt_phone=%s&Submit=Submit
Add Text to a File with Launchy
This is particularly useful for todo lists. It one requires a bit of work outside of Launchy, first make a folder called todo on either your hard drive, or a flash drive if you a running Launchy from it. In this make a blank .txt file called todo.txt or whatever you like. Next in a text editor make a new file named add.bat with only the line echo %*>>C:\Todo\todo.txt where C:\Todo\ is your folder and Todo.txt is your blank text file. So now in your folder you should have add.bat and todo.txt.
Next in Launchy under options and the catalog tab click the plus button and add C:\Todo, or whatever your folder is. Then while this is selected add *.bat and *.txt to File Types on the left (you have to type then and then hit the + (plus) button underneath). Be sure to have the box labelled Include Executables checked, then you can re-scan catalog and you should be set.
To use it bring up Launchy and type add and hit tab to get the add -> and type whatever you want to add, such as add -> write simplehelp article. Now you can bring up your todo list quickly by typing todo (or whatever the text file is named) to see your todo list in full.
