Enso Launcher (pretty, flashy, and nice)

Published Jan 26, 2007

After reading Scott Hanselman's blog post today called "Another Way to Replace Start Run - Enso Launcher" I downloaded it. Very nice!

Until now, I haven't found a challenger to SlickRun. If you don't have SlickRun yet, download it and enter Win-Q bliss. For working on development projects I've got projectname set up as a link to my Visual Studio solution file, _projectname set to open the project source files in explorer, and >projectname set to open up any related documents etc. for the project in explorer. I probably hit the Windows key - Q combination a 100 times a day. And you have to love "morning", my shortcut set to automatically open up Outlook, RSS reader, and QuickBooks in one fell swoop.

However, having said that, it takes much too long to set up shortcut links when you're focused on getting something done (leading to sometimes days of countless drilling down in explorer to find a regularly accessed item). And, though possibly a bit too hedonistic, it just isn't very pretty and flashy and nice. I've tried Launchy, but while pretty, flashy, and nice, it just doesn't seem to do it for me.

Enter Enso...it might be what I'm looking for. My favourite commands in the few minutes I've been using it:

minimize: egads! A shortcut to minimize a window in Windows! What a concept.
google search term: in SlickRun I do "google", whch then opens up google.com and then I enter search terms.That much quicker (and prettier).
calculate: highlight a calculation in any application (i.e. 768*98+20908), highlight it and run calculate. Presto, the calculation is replaced with 96172.

And it's so pretty, flashy, and nice! Now if they would just change the shortcut from the awkward CAPS LOCK shortcut key; I think I'll be using the CAPS -> Alt to turn on and then Alt -> CAPS to turn off combination, but then my minimize command becomes that much more convoluted. Having played squash for the first time ever last night with Jon, I realize my squash playing abilities are about as dexterous as holding down the CAPS key while typing something with the letter "a" in it (why does a squash ball just not bounce like every other ball on this planet?).