Keystroke Launcher

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A windows shortcut is a special type of file linked to another object. You can think of a shortcut as a pointer to an object, it permits you to access a file or application without having to navigate to it on your hard drive. Shortcuts always have a target associated with them which they invoke when executed. Depending on the target, the shortcut may open a folder, run a program, open a document and so on. When you install programs to your PC, windows shortcuts are automatically created on the desktop and in the start menu. When you use documents or almost any file type, windows shortcuts are created in your My recent Documents.

 

Use the Keystroke Launcher command if you don't want to create separate hotkeys for each application, folder or file. Invoke the Keystroke Launcher search screen with a hotkey. Type in the program name and a drop down list will appear with any shortcut title containing that search phrase. Select the one you were looking for by using the keyboard up and down arrows or the mouse and the shortcut's target will be opened. This is very powerful and makes it a lot faster to launch a shortcut like this rather than going to the start, menu and searching for a program shortcut with your eyes using the mouse. The Keystroke Launcher command can also scan your PC for other file types and folders anywhere on a hard drive.

 

Create a new hotkey. Select the default command Keystroke Launcher. And set the other attributes:

Step 1:

Select the base folder to scan. Usually if you are the only person using a PC then the base folder should be "c:\Documents and Settings\" to scan for your shortcut files. If you and your family share a PC then go one folder down and select your username as base folder to only scan for the program shortcuts you installed like "c:\Documents and Settings\Magnus Kruger\".

 

Step 2:

Select the file types to be scanned. In this case we are scanning for *.lnk files which are windows shortcut files.

 

Step 3:

These are the options available with this step:

•Index when PC is idle after "5" minutes. Usually to build the index is quick. But if you have a lot of file types to be scanned it can take a couple of seconds too long. HotKeyz will use the "5" minute index time to index your base folder when your PC is un-attended for "5" minutes. In other words when it is idle for "5" minutes. The "5" minutes can be changed to any time that suites you.
•Or you can choose to build the index when you lock your workstation. HotKeyz will detect that you have locked your workstation (by pressing the default windows hotkey WinKey+L) and then starts building the index.
•Or you can re-build the index every time you press the keystroke launcher hotkey. On some computers this might be slow except if you have a really fast PC.

 

You can at any time rebuild the index by right clicking on the hotkey list view and select the re-build index item in the popup menu. This option will be shown for keystroke launcher commands only.

 

Step 4:

These are the options available with this step:

•Search the index 1000 milli secs after the last key is pressed in the search window. When you press the keystroke launcher hotkey and the keyword search window is displayed, you can enter a search word like "help" and HotKeyz will wait a 1000 milliseconds after the last key was pressed i.e. the 'p' in the word "help" before displaying the search results in a drop down list. Or you can choose to ...
•Search the index when the enter key is pressed. After you have typed the word "help", press the enter key and the search results will be shown immediately.

 

The best is to play around with all these options as you go along and see which ones works the best for you. Also remember that you can also search a folder for *.* files. I use this option where my base folder is where all my documents are located. I have a keystroke launcher hotkey for this folder. I have set HotKeyz to index when my PC is idle for 5 minutes because this folder and it's sub-folders contains a lot of document files. When I press my hotkey and search for a word in the filename it will give all the files containing that word in an instant. I select the correct one and the document is opened. Once you start using this you will be amazed at how powerful the Keystroke Launcher is!