4 ms·

I applaud you making HotChime, but how does it compare to Launchy?

• chime 17y ago
  Honestly, I haven't even tried anything else because I'm just so used to HotChime. I've been using it for 7-8 years now and can't work without it. I know it's not polite to toot your own horn but I would have said this about HotChime regardless of who wrote it. While I can't compare it to Launchy or others, I can tell you how HotChime works. No matter which app you're in, press [pause] and type anything. If it has a space character in it, it will Google it. Otherwise, it will launch default browser to www.[whatyoutyped].com. If you have predefined [whatyoutyped] to something else, it will open that (website, file, folder). I have HN mapped to 'h', Slashdot mapped to '/.' (literally) and my local weather to 'w'. You can also setup custom %s searches for F1-F5 key. I have F2 = Wikipedia (mapped to chir.ag/wiki/%s e.g. http://chir.ag/wiki/hacker http://chir.ag/wiki/hacker ), F3 = Dictionary, F4 = Thesaurus, F5 = PHP manual. It's not that useful for average users but for powerusers/keyboard-types, it works great. Also, it's a single 37kb exe, no install/uninstall. Do realize that I wrote this in 2003, long before every browser had a search box and before Google had maps/local-searching. Yahoo was the first browser with zip-code searching. If I made a new version, I would add lots of small features like built-in calculator, suggest, file-browsing etc. But for now it works well for me.
  • TheSOB88 17y ago
    Sounds nothing like Launchy. Launchy searches for apps of similar names as what you searched, and ranks them in order of usage. Makes the Start Menu obsolete. Your app sounds not quite as good as mapping your browser's address bar to I'm Feeling Lucky.