Ctrl+Alt+Launch
One of the most useful little utilities I have found. Ctrl+Alt+Launch (or Cal as it is usually referred to) is a shortcut utility that allows you to quickly launch programs on your computer. Here’s how it works:
- Click Ctrl+Alt (or designate your own shortcut key combo) and a small prompt box will come up.
- Start typing in the name of the shortcut you created, any program in your start menu, a web address, or a path on your file system and let the autocomplete do it’s job. You can even search the web!
That’s it! No more browsing through folders, no more digging through the start menu, it’s all done for you. Even if you don’t setup shortcuts this little utility is useful.
Did I say little? I meant it. Despite the program doing some background indexing, it rarely ties up processing cycles, and only uses 3MB of RAM on my computer.
For such a small program it is amazingly configurable. You can get to the configuration through the taskbar icon and setup many options from running on startup, turning features on and off, and even configuring 3 different web searches!
All that made a useful program for me with very little work, but what about the shortcuts? Shortcuts allow you to setup an alias for a program to launch it. Of course, there are times that you want to launch more than one program at a time. For this you can setup a keyword on each of these shortcuts to launch it. My favorite is one called “startup” that simply opens my e-mail and all the apps I generally want to check shortly after sitting down to the computer.
Ctrl+Alt+Launch is a powerful and easy-to-use utility that once you start using you will be hooked. Best of all, it’s free!
