Finding your way with the help of Launchy
I am sure this hasn’t occurred to many of us, but we spend a lot of time browsing directories. This used to drive me insane. Not anymore.
Enter Launchy. Where have YOU been all my life?!? Launchy is a neat, simple freeware launcher. It allows you to launch just about anything–applications, files, websites… You name it. No more walking through a directory folder by folder or waiting for the Start menu to unfold!
To launch Launchy, you simply press Alt + Space. Then, you just type a few characters of a file name and Launchy automatically suggests the best match for it in your system. Press Enter to open it or, if the best match is not what you were looking for, scroll the drop-down menu until you find the appropriate file. Voilà. The neat thing is that whatever you pick in the menu, Launchy will remember it and it will propose it to you next time around, ahead of other matches. It’s like having a personal secretary all to yourself!
How does this relate to translation? Let me give you a few real life examples. When I want to start translating, I just call up Launchy and type “work”. Upon pressing Enter, Trados Translator’s Workbench launches. When I am doing my bookkeeping, I type “inv” and accept the proposed choice–and my Invoices folder opens like magic. If I need to look up a word, all I have to do is type “wordr” in Launchy and it will launch my default browser and load the Wordreference website.
Launchy indexes the directories you specify, so you can limit the number of irrelevant results. In other words, results will come only from the directories you told Launchy to keep an eye on. You can also use plugins for trickier functions. For example, you can search Google, Wikipedia and Amazon directly through Launchy. You can also use it as a calculator.
Launchy makes life simple and productive. I would have been happy to pay for it, but it is free! The author, Josh Karlin, welcomes donations, though.
For more information on Launchy, to download it and to browse plugins, visit www.launchy.net.
Since I have been using Launchy, I haven’t touched the Start menu. I haven’t used Windows Explorer either. They have become utterly useless. Oh, and there are no icons on my desktop–just a neat wallpaper. This is the single best weapon in my translator software arsenal.
