Find and Run Robot - Small yet Powerful Launcher

I got to use an iBook running OSX for a week, and one application on it that utterly blew me away was QuickSilver, which is a launcher with a PhD in data mining and an MA in Zen aesthetics. Jealous and envious, I wanted something similar for windows. Alas nothing exists anywhere close to QuickSilver, so I looked to see what the best Launcher there was for windows. My criteria were:

1. Keyboard based, no menu's, buttons or mouse clicks
   
2. Adaptive and intelligent - I don't want to manually setup keywords, but tell it where to look. And it must learn from my preferences
   
3. Progressive find, just like in Opera
   
4. Fast, with little resource usage
   

After googling around, I found AppRocket, which was OK (very clean UI and simple) but left me unsatisfied (I also tried True Launch Bar, which is excellent but still menu-based thus slow, also requiring full manual configuration).

Luckily by chance I then discovered Find and Run Robot (FARR), a piece of excellent Freeware. It fulfilled all my criteria, and whats more, the developer loves to receive feedback and discuss suggestions for improvement; and the forums are very friendly. If no one has ever used a launch tool before, they will be shocked how more productive they will be than fighting with the Start Menu / Explorer! Of course it works perfectly with Opera:

Main FARR web page
Small demo movie
The FARR forum

The latest versions (V1.07x) have added support for web searches using regex's; you can also use it to trigger advanced script or nircmd's etc. Soon one can use modifiers to e.g. find only music files or pictures etc.

farr.png

The screenshot shows it in action, I pressed <pause> to activate then started typing Opera, it has progressive searched through my folders to find the most relevant items, the ones I use most are given greater weighting (score) so are at the top. Faster than any other way to launch files/searches...

EDIT: I should mention the software needs no "install"; the installer EXE can be opened as a ZIP file and contents extracted manually if you prefer, which is great for those of us who prefer manual installation…

Thanks non-troppo, I'll have to check this out.

I tried AppRocket a few months ago but didn't quite like it. Then I found RunFast which is very simple but it isn't adaptive, but I still like it and use it since I don't do much searching and use it mainly as an application launcher.

And I'd also like to mention that I've found the Opera Wiki very useful over the past couple of years. Nice work

I'd tried RunFast too; for me FARR was more flexible and smart. I just wanted to point it to directories, not have to set up all aliases manually where FARR excels.

The wiki is a collaborative effort of the community so the thanks are due to many others, I just try to shepherd information into one place!

Updated to 1.07.13 with paste support, you can use it to paste text into any app; and import/export of search engines added.

Sounds very interesting, if it does what i think it will. Will surely give it a try. non, have u tried powerpro, is it something similar to it??

I loved the program so much I actually donated some money to the site. This program plus the screenshot captor one are never going to be uninstalled from my machines.

Thanks non-troppo, I liked this program and screenshot captor so much I donated to the site. These two programs will never not be on any computer I use, in fact I have them on my pen drive so I can use them where ever I am.

Thanks non-troppo, I liked this program and screenshot captor so much I donated to the site. These two programs will never not be on any computer I use, in fact I have them on my pen drive so I can use them where ever I am.

FARR is updated to V1.07.18b, nicest additions are a powerful alias command, to recursively start new searches, and an optional skin system that even when activated takes a pretty small ~300kb extra working set:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=1070.0

Originally posted by chesss:

Sounds very interesting, if it does what i think it will. Will surely give it a try. non, have u tried powerpro, is it something similar to it??

I tried it a long time ago (and used to use stilleto before that!), but it is too much manual setup compared to FARR.

Originally posted by alex_p:

Thanks non-troppo, I liked this program and screenshot captor so much I donated to the site. These two programs will never not be on any computer I use, in fact I have them on my pen drive so I can use them where ever I am.

Yeah, screeshot captor is very neat as well!

BTW, for FARR users, you can use the Opera SearchPlugins page to also install search plugins for FARR:

http://nontroppo.org/wiki/SearchPlugins?farr=1

Originally posted by non-troppo:

My criteria were:

1. Keyboard based, no menu's, buttons or mouse clicks
   
2. Adaptive and intelligent - I don't want to manually setup keywords, but tell it where to look. And it must learn from my preferences
   
3. Progressive find, just like in Opera
   
4. Fast, with little resource usage
   

Did you tried JetStart? It has similar functions and some are very handy, like edge menus. Last version allows assign commands to extended keys on the new keyboards. This way it can control Winamp, volume level or rebind keys.

Grat, just superb the additional soft is too worth a tr ;] the Clipboard Help+Spell is also grat

hi all, i just found this thread.

I have spent some hours searching for indexed searching on windows platform. Almost nothing satisfies me enough.

I although recommend you to try ESP (www.espsw.com) it's shareware but it itself doesn;t force you to register it. It's only 340kb, no installation, just one file. It's a little abandoned but it works OK. It's an application launcher/ searching tool almost like FARR

The COMMON desktop searching packages:"Google Desktop Search", x1, exalead, windows desktop search, copernicus, blinkx etc....., are just COMMON crap.

Now there are developed some open source solutions @ sf.net, but still are immature and I wouldn't recommend anyone to try them.

I dont understand you sticking with FARR, it's a good prog but it really has to catch up with this, -to be realistic- OLD "technology", called indexing of data...

Windows platform is the only one which _still_ doesnt have fine solutions to the searching and the management of our files...

You can also use Opera to launch applications. Just copy the shortcut from the Start menu, and paste it into Opera's keyboard editor.

x,y,z = Execute program, <Shortcut Target>

Mnemonic Shortcuts

thanks, non-troppo, for this wonderful link. I have just looked at the site and not only this program but some of the others offered by the same author are very interesting.
I will probably spend too much time testing all of them - a great find