Find and Run Robot at Paradox Designs

There are many app launchers out there, and I have blogged about them a few times before. I have found yet another, and this one seems to be the best I have tried. It is Find and Run Robot.

Find and run robot is by no means new. It has been out for quite a while, and is very well developed. Unlike Launchy, it is closed source, similar to Skylight. It has similar functionality to most other application launchers, that is, you press a key, type, and it shows you results. But the similarities end there. The key it uses is the PAUSE key, which is a bit out of the way, but very few other things use it, so you wont run into many other problems.

System Footprint

Most launchers have a huge memory footprint, and take up lots of CPU power. FARR, as it will be called, does not. Unlike most other launchers, FARR does not activly index your computer, so when your not using it, it doesn’t use CPU cycles. There is a plugin for FARR that taps into the windows indexing service, more on that later. Since FARR does not index, it also doesn’t build up large database files for searching. When you call FARR to search, it does it activly at your request, so results can be a bit slow, but I have not noticed this too much.

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Appearance

FARR really has no restrictions on appearance. It is similar to some launchers, but different than the original, quicksilver. You basically have a control bar, entry bar, and results list. You can change the appearance using skins. FARR comes with quite a few skins installed, and they claim there are more at their website, but I can’t find them. From the preferences pane, you can also adjust the opacity of the window, toggle alpha fading, and many other things.

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Customization

FARR excels in customization. While it is quite fully featured at first, you can add to this set through plugins and aliases. Plugins are programs that run inside FARR, such as a calculator, and extend its functionality. Aliases allow you to set commands to execute complex strings, such as searching a particular website or only displaying data of a certain type. Aliases can be REGEX strings, so they are quite customizable, and allow unix hands to create commands that will emulate GREP. There are a number of useful plugins avalible, such as one that lets you search your computer using Locate32 (built in windows indexing). Another useful one is a calcluator, which provides access to some simple and not so simple calculations. You can pretty much find plugins to do whatever you want.

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Overview

All in all, FARR is the best App launcher i have tried. It will stay on my desktop, alongside Vista Start Menu[1. The program VistaStartMenu, not the one included in windows vista]. Its customization is nice, and its speed is what sets it apart from any other tool i have used. The themes it has are stylish and look good, which few others can claim.