On my mac at home I’ve been using Quicksilver for some time now. I’ve got no complaints there.

At work, where unfortunately I’m stuck with a pc for the moment, I have been trying out application launchers for Windows.

After looking around a bit decided to give two a try, Enso and Launchy. I tried Launchy first. It was very simple, I bound it to CTRL + SPACE as that is my preference, using that keystroke, the launcher appears (which is nicely skinnable), you begin typing, it starts figuring out which app you want to launch. Very like Quicksilver. I can’t fault it.

Enso, to be fair is more than just an application launcher. You can do a lot more with Enso as is detailed on their demo. There is one big difference however and I found it to be a deal breaker for me. To launch anything you must first type open and then the name of the app you want to launch.

Why must you force me to type open? It’s not that much hassle to figure out that the word I’ve typed is not too dissimilar to an app name and perhaps I want to launch it.

What’s more is Enso is a bit more fussy about how you spell the app that you’re trying to launch. Launchy doesn’t care if, in a hurry, I happen to type firwfox instead of firefox, Humanized, have you forgotten that I am in fact human and do make mistakes?

Enso also has methods like calculate and define. To use them you must select an expression you want to calculate or a word you want the meaning of and then hold down CAPS LOCK, type calculate or define and it will evaluate your expression or define the selected word. In this case it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination by any means to determine the the text currently selected is a mathmatical expression or a word and just do calculate it or define it without me having to explicitly type the command.

Enso is supposed to be about increasing productivity and I really think it could do better. Unless they reduce the amount of keystrokes it takes to do the basic commands that they support I’ll just be using Launchy.