Do you get tired of weaving through multiple levels of menus to find a program you’re looking for? Do you hate cluttering up your desktop with dozens of icons? Do you long for the good old command-line days? Ok, maybe that last one was a stretch, but if you think it’s much faster to type a few characters than to traverse menus in order to launch an application, you’ll enjoy this little gem.

Launchy is a program that sits quietly (and invisibly) in the background, waiting for you to press ALT + spacebar to activate it. When you do, a very simple interface pops up offering you a line to type on:

Typing a few characters brings up matching options instantly such as the application shown here. I only had to type “fi” to see Firefox displayed here:

Launchy is similar to another great find-n-launch utility: QuickSilver for the Mac.