After I read some more people saying how Launchy is really good, I thought I’d give it a try, although I said I’m not the kind of guy who uses it.

In fact I found it useful for some types of task. I really enjoyed finding out that it is learning, so if you once type one or two letters and select an app from the list and not take Launchy suggestion, Launchy will remember your selection, and the next time you type these letter(s), you will get your last selection as the first suggestion. This made me teach Launchy to start some applications using their first letter such as O for Outlook and F for firefox. This is mainly useful in my laptop startup process at home, where I start Firefox and Outlook after connecting to VPN. I know I could have written a script to do it, but Launchy makes it very easy to do it without writing that script.

Another usage I found useful is to mute or "unmute" the speaker. Before Launchy, if I didn’t know if the speakers were off or not, and I wanted to turn them on or off, I had to click the speaker icon in the system tray, wait two seconds for the volume slider to appear, and then set the Mute checkbox to what I want. After I started using Launchy, I downloaded mute.exe from here, and then created two shortcuts – mute.lnk and unmute.lnk, and then I "taught" Launchy to use "M" and "U" to run them.

I did find some problems with it:

• It doesn’t support Hebrew. I tried running a Firefox favorite with a Hebrew name, and it just didn’t find it. Maybe it’s just the Foxy plugin that sucks, since it does find Hebrew strings in the Start menu.
• Trying to teach him to run a Firefox favorite with just one letter behave strangely. It keeps showing the favorite page title, instead of the name of the favorite.
• It would be nice if whenever it saw the beginning of a file path (like "C:’" or "’’host’") it would auto-complete it, but do it properly, like Total Commander 7 does it.