Launchy 2 and batch files
Posted by Ken Brooks Wed, 26 Dec 2007 14:16:00 GMT
I feel crippled when I work on windows. The reason is that I rely on QuickSilver on my mac so much. The closest thing I’ve been using (and I think I’ve tried them all) is Launchy. While not living up to the lofty bar set by quicksilver, launchy has worked relatively well for me in my windows (read: work) life.
Today I saw a notification that Launchy 2.0 was out and decided to upgrade. Shame on me because I didn’t do any reading about it first. Normally I wouldn’t figure this to be an issue. Just download it, install it and move on. However that little miss cost me an hour or so of time.
Launchy was rewritten and as a casualty of that all existing configurations (directories to be scanned, custom commands, etc..) paid the ultimate price. Gone. So just be warned that if you plan on upgrading to 2.0 you should probably jot down your configurations.
Another change, which I don’t want to waste the brain cycles on figuring out why, is that I used to be able to start a .bat file that we use to set environment variables and so on. That would open up and stay in the command prompt. Since the upgrade it opens the batch file, runs it and then exits the shell. Hrm… not exactly what I hoping for.
I created a workaround that actually provides a little more functionality than before. There is a plugin called runny or runner bundled with launchy and we can leverage that.
- Open up launchy
- Right click and choose options
- Select the 4th tab ‘Plugins’
- Click on ‘Runner’ in the left pane
- Click the + to add another command to be run
- give it a name (the shortcut you will refer to it as when invoking launchy)
- put C:\WINNT\System32\cmd.exe or C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe in the program column
- put /K pathtobat\batfile.bat $$ in the arguments column
- click ok
Now when you invoke launchy you can give it the short name and hit enter, or give it the short name, hit tab and then pass additional arguments to your batch file..
