Can someone explain why reviewers get wet pantied over Launchbar, Quicksilver, Alfred, and the like?
I MORE than understand the appeal of the more complex tasks these things do, but they are all identified as “Application Launchers” first, all the other stuff is extra.
When it comes to launching applications, what could possibly be any easier than command-space, type the name of the app? Especially if the app is frequently used, which is what will come up first in the results?
This is the exact keystroke sequence for me to open Mail ( and most of the applications I use most of the time are this simple):
There’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing, but I prefer Alfred.
Essentially the same number of keystrokes (maybe fewer), but since it’s a dedicated app launcher, there are fewer false results.
I’m not a big fan of Spotlight, but it’s because I think it encourages people to not pay attention to where they keep their files. Also, it’s far to put your most-used applications in the Dock. For anything else it’s command-shift-a (or u as the case may be) type the first few letters in the name (ma, to use your example), then command-o to open it.
I agree that installing third party ‘launchers’ is kind of silly. OSX is perfectly capable of launching applications on its own.
Speaking only for myself, Spotlight is extraneous and annoying. Apps I use most often go in the Dock; move pointer to bottom of screen, one click. Everything else can easily be found in the appropriately named Finder. If I don’t know exactly where a particular app, folder, or file is, Finder has this convenient search panel in the corner that works essentially exactly the same as Spotlight. There’s also Mission Control. Installing outside apps to do what OS X already does at least three times over is ludicrous.
My method of launching my most-used apps is the simplest of all. I have them mapped to Function Keys (via Spark, a Shareware program useful for other purposes as well).
So F2 opens Chrome, F7 opens Pages, F11 opens Adium (my chat program of choice), and F12 opens Mail. F6 will take me to Finder.
The added benefit of this is that these F-Keys can then also be used as Application switchers, as they’ll bring the app to the front if it’s already open. I still use Command-Tab to do this sometimes, just depends on the situation.
For launching less-frequently-used apps, I prefer Quicksilver. The app’s icon shows up real big right in the middle of the screen, so I don’t have to bring my eyes up to the right corner, and any other (less-likely) choices are listed in smaller type below it.
The keystroke to invoke Quicksilver, Command-Space Bar, is the same as Spotlight (which is fine as I rarely use Spotlight anyway). So no difference in the number of Keystrokes.
Man, you people are judgmental!
I’ve been a Mac user for 30 years, and I can’t see anything wrong with customizing your system to make it more efficient.
My current setup has 7.37 Mpixels of screen real-estate, so moving the mouse all the way to the dock, and then sliding back and forth to hit the target is much slower than “opt-space, f, return” to launch FireFox (for example).
It works the same as Spotlight because it is Spotlight! What is the extraneous and annoying thing you seem to *think *is Spotlight? Can you describe it?
I’m 100% with beowulff. Anything that involves mousing is inherently less efficient, more annoying and far more dangerous. Mousing sucks in a variety-pack of ways, not the least being repetitive stress injury, which in my case involves the tendon running down the back of my hand from my middle finger, which is permanently damaged by a couple of decades of mousing. I had to train myself to use a stylus exclusively a couple of years ago because I was becoming genuinely crippled in my right hand. The pain comes right back in seconds when I am forced to use a mouse, which now, after becoming fully adapted to the the extremely precise and lightweight stylus, feels like a brick in my hand.
Life on a computer will be nirvana when I can do everything with a combination of keys and my voice.
Nobody’s being judgmental! Certainly not about customization, because I’m a NUT for it. I spend more time futzing with my system than I do using it. My OP was a sincere question, because it really seems to me that a spotlight search is the most efficient.
Not to denigrate a setup you like, that’s great, but for ME it would be adding a bunch of extra hassle and wasting perfectly good keys that could be used to launch scripts and workflows and all kinds of other things, and keys are a precious resource in my world; so much so that I recently changed my keyboard mappings to free up the largely pointless caps lock key to acts as a substitute for the awkward but available modifier combination of shift-command-option-control, thus giving myself a slew of new empty key combination slots.
Your method also means adding the memorization of the Fkey application mappings to the other five dozen tweaks I’m trying to remember the key combinations for, which seems like a lot of work, given that I naturally don’t have to learn anything new to spell the name of the app I want.
And all of us being able to do these different things that suit us is a huge part of the fun of computers!
So here’s my current control-freak frustration: window management. It’s so damned pointer-intensive and I would probably burst into tears if could count up the time I’ve spent making the same choices over and over and over again about how to align and setup my windows.
None of the window managers I’ve found do the most important thing I need: make changes to the windows en masse. They are helpful for dealing with a couple of windows at a time for something specific, but when I’ve got a dozen windows open and all over the place, I desperately long for the ability to cascade/tile all of them according to my preferences. Quickeys used to do it but it hasn’t been working for me for a couple of years and I haven’t been able to find anything else.
Today I read about an open source app called Slate that sounds like the Swiss knife of window management, and if mastered, would be a little slice of heaven. But it seems to be very complex with a very steep learning curve, and if I’m going to plunge into a steep learning curve, that’s really not the smartest thing to pick, when I have so many other important, productive and useful things waiting to be learned.
As you say, everyone’s workflow is different. I don’t use scripts in my work, and I can’t off-hand think of what else I would use Function Keys for. I’m belatedly seeing that you can use them for Paragraph Styles in Pages — I think I never did that because I was used to using a Command-Key combination to select them from the many years I used WriteNow in the pre-OS X days. But maybe I’ll rework things. Memorization of the Function Key/App mapping was no problem at all, as I use these keys every single day of my life.
Again, different strokes (NPI) — I couldn’t do without the Caps Lock key because my convention is to give all folders in the Finder uppercase names, with all files within them upper/lower.
The big thing for me with Quicksilver is that I can use any sequence of characters from the App name. For example, if I type “sfr”, Safari pops up. Whereas for spotlight, nada. Also, I really like that Quicksilver pops right in the middle of the screen and uses big bright icons.
Quicksilver also learns and re-ranks things based on what app/file you select with a given key sequence. Not sure if Spotlight does that.
I think part of it is that when Spotlight was introduced with Tiger it was actually a bit crap. It was slow and as such basically unusable as a launcher, so people went to other solutions and stuck with them. And because of that they are not actually aware that Spotlight is really very good these days.
I launch almost exclusively with Spotlight. I have Alfred installed just for easy screen locking, but if someone can tell me how to do that with Spotlight too I’ll happily uninstall Alfred.
