Comments on: Productivity Tip#1 for Geeks – Launch software using keyboard on Windows

By: jim long

jim long — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:16:35 +0000

Your picture of the interlocked gears would never turn.
Not very productive.

By: Geeko

Geeko — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:41:21 +0000

Users keep in mind that path should be pasted in system variable tab rather than user variable . Best is two put in both path variables.

regds,

Geeko

By: Earl Jenkins

Earl Jenkins — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:40:57 +0000

No, JuneBUG, it’s not just you, but it seems to be very few of us.

I’ve been using keyboard shortcuts on Windows since my first computer that had Win95. I discovered that with any shortcut icon on the desktop or in the start menu, I could right-click, select Properties, and enter a keyboard shortcut for that item, just by clicking in the edit box and pressing the key combination I wanted. I realized that no program ever uses Ctrl+Shift+Alt + anything for an in-program shortcut, so I started mapping all of my regularly-used programs to shortcuts with those keys (to avoid key-combination mapping collisions). For example:

Ctrl+Shift+Alt+N => Notepad
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+X => Excel
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+P => Paint
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+C => Calculator
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+W => Web Browser

The nice thing is, it’s even easier to type than invoking the Run window, then typing a couple of letters, and then pressing Enter. The other nice thing is it’s super-easy to set up, so if I’m ever working on someone else’s computer, I can just go into their Start menu, right click on Notepad (for example), and set up the shortcut, without having to create new folders, modify the path, or (as some have suggested) install a new program.

Give it a try!

Earl

By: Don Boling

Don Boling — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:08:32 +0000

Great tip. simple and yet very powerful.

Don

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:53:43 +0000

AWESOME!!!!

This is the “out-of-the-box-slickrun” !
(which I used for years… http://www.bayden.com/Slickrun/ )

Thanks for this great tip!
Simon

By: SR

SR — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:45:18 +0000

Hey, I was following the same tip already and interesting piece is that I have couple of shortcuts with same name.

By: Parimal

Parimal — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:08:56 +0000

Thanks a lot for this. Keep sharing the tips.

Cheers’
Parimal

By: tdowg1

tdowg1 — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:21:44 +0000

Ramesh:
Wow, what a coincidence!! I got so sick and tired of this in windows that I did this exact same thing about 6-9 months ago… except i named my c:\shortcuts folder c:\bin instead.

Awesome write up!! Kudos!

I use this ‘hack’ or whatever you wanna call it ALL THE TIME.

instead of touching my mouse, whenever i want to open up firefox, i just type ff and BLAD-DOW! Whenever I want to open my muzik source dir, i just type m and BLAD… …. well, you get the point.

@JuneBUG:
I had not given it much thought, but I will after your suggestion. One limitation I could forsee, though, is that you can’t make something like ‘ff’ open firefox.. it sounds like it would have to be something like ALT+ff perhaps? or something I would easily forget compared to the letter ‘m’ for muzik. IDK, I will give it a looksee tho, thanks for suggesting.

By: Krish

Krish — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:14:36 +0000

You might want to try out Launchy, it can really be helpful when accessing programs via the keyboard..

By: wf

wf — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:00:16 +0000

Being able to run those apps from the command prompt is very useful for me. Thanks a lot.