Cleaning House

Last week, my desktop was a total, utter disgrace.  I had icons everywhere…and I mean everywhere.  I have a sweet wide-screen Dell monitor (my 5th favorite material possession), which means there’s a lot of real estate on the desktop. And all of it was covered with crap.  To find the Recycle Bin or anything else was like playing Where’s Waldo.  It was really starting to bother me.  And I think that having a clean desktop, like a clean office, is probably more relaxing and conducive to getting stuff done.

Well, anyway, I shoveled all the garbage into the Recycle Bin and then threw most of the other stuff into the proper folders.  It was looking a lot better…just a couple of icons.  Whenever I do my desktop cleaning, I grab new wallpaper too.  I usually just go with a tiled pattern or something simple and abstract.  This time I ran across “Show Me Your World” by Nyius on Deviant Art.  As you can see, in the thumbnail it looks just like a blue wall, faded in places, but when you’re really close - it’s a rather beautiful old-school map.  It might seem too monotone but I love it…it’s not at all distracting but it’s visually pleasing.  I also moved my task bar from the botttom to the right side of the screen and I’ve found that to work a lot better.

And that’s where I usually stop, declaring my desktop cleaning mission accomplished.  But not this time…this time I decided to keep going, just a little bit.  Well, a little bit turned into hours and I’m not even satisfied yet.  In my desktop adventures, I came across three helpful programs.  They’re all free and they’re all great - what’s better than that?  So I’ll discuss one today and the other two in my next post.

Okay, so when I had only a few icons left on my desktop, it obviously looked a lot better.  But I was thinking…I don’t even like these icons.  I’m going icon-less!  At that point I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to accomplish that, but I hid my remaining icons anyway.  I poked around the net looking for an alternate way to rock and roll.  I kept seeing one program in particular that everyone spoke highly of: Launchy.  It’s free and open source.  At first I didn’t think I would like Launchy (sorry Launchy - I love you now!), because I’m so used to working with my mouse on the desktop.  But I was wrong.

How to describe Launchy?  Well, “physically,” it’s a bar that you can input text into that you place on your desktop.  But behind the scenes, Launchy indexes your Start Menu, your Documents, your collection of obscure music that no one else is cool enough to get…whatever.  It indexes what you tell it to.  So let’s say I want to play a little Daikatana.  I start typing it into Launchy.   As I type, Launchy doesn’t wait until I finish.  Once I’ve typed, say, “Dai,” and there are three programs that start with those letters - Launchy will display one choice and give me a drop down menu with the other two.  Then let’s say you get to “Daik” and there are no other programs but the awesomest game ever. Launchy will complete the word Daikatana and display the file icon.  Just press enter and you’re swinging your magic sword or whatever.

Maybe I’m complicating it - it’s just type, enter and program launched.  Or if you only input some letters - type, select from drop down menu, enter, launch.  So the beauty of Launchy is that it replaces all those icons on your desktop.  You no longer need them.  You no longer need to use your Start Menu.  Until you try it, you may be dubious - but once you get used to it you’ll be hooked.  Oh, it can also index your favorites folder so you type in say “always” and it will pop up with “Always Go Right.”  Press enter and you’re on the web and on our page.  You can choose the browser it launches.

As I said, you can pick which folders you want Launchy to index, and even how “deep” it goes in those folders.  There are other options as well, and one I really liked, since I’m trying to make my desktop perfect…is that you can select various skins to use with Launchy and control their opacity.  Some of these dramatically change Launchy’s look.  They’re very easy to install (just toss into the Skins folder and go into Options) and you can grab some on Deviant Art or the Launchy Forums.  So Launchy looks awesome as well as making you more efficient.

In addition to skins, there are various plugins.  For example, you can make Launchy a calculator.  But a really key plugin in is Runny.  I could do a whole post on Runny so I’ll just keep this brief and quote the example from the official documentation:

Create aliases for your favorite commands, even those that require user input. For instance, create the command “mailto: $1” with the alias of “email” . Then, when you type “email” into Launchy, hit tab, and then type the email address the email address will replace the $1 and your email client will launch.

Free and cool - Launchy’s a winner.  And I barely scratched the surface of what you can use it for.