Several categories of Windows application launchers have evolved over the past several years. In this post, I’ll look at the best and most popular products in each category. I’m only going to mention products that are either quite stable or that have been updated recently.

Auto-Config

Products in this category typically provide a polished GUI, automatically track the shortcuts on your system (Start Menu, recently launched apps and documents, etc.), and are summoned via a single hotkey. Typing a few characters will filter from the list of installed applications to quickly find the desired the one to launch, and pressing Enter launches it. The idea is to avoid having to configure anything, and (hopefully) the application quickly learns your habits and remembers the best matches for frequently typed abbreviations.

Many applications in this category also provide additional features (for instance, capture of selected text from current app, web search, inline calculator, auto-type from abbreviations, etc.) and support a plug-in architecture for user extensibility.

Single Key Launchers

Launchers in this category provide a more basic interface (typically text-only and no icons) that is more like the Run dialog on steroids. They are also launched with a single hotkey, and filter on the text you type to identify user-defined abbreviations which launch an application, open a web page, etc.

Start Menu Replacements

These applications attempt to provide a better alternative to the Windows Start Menu.

Typing Activated

Applications in this category provide a minimal user interface. Rather than summoning the application with a hotkey, you actually type into whatever application you’re in, and when the application identifies some abbreviation that you’ve defined, it pops up a confirmation prompt. Confirming the prompt erases the typed text from the current application and launches the application (or performs other functionality, such as typing boilerplate text) connected to that abbreviation.

Some products overlap multiple categories. I’ll look more in depth at some of these applications in future posts. Some additional categories that I won’t explore are hotkey programs, full-fledged macro programs, programmable keyboards, toolbar (mouse-centric) applications, and voice-activated launchers.