How to forget about shortcuts on the desktop?

Introduction

Previously, I often had the problem of cluttering up the desktop with a huge number of shortcuts, and I started to get lost in them, respectively, to lose time when searching for the applications I needed. Later, I learned how to use the win + r keyboard shortcut, creating shortcuts with names in system32. With the advent of Windows Vista (7), now only the win buttons are available, but the flexibility and customization of these methods is very limited. There is also a huge number of hotkey-managers , but I did not become friends with one of them.

Launchers

Recently (in my opinion, after reading the book "A productive programmer. How to make a complex simple, and the impossible - possible" by Neal Ford), my interest fell on launchers. For the windows platform, I found a few:
')

• SlickRun http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/
• slimCODE http://www.slimcode.com/
• Colibri http://colibri.leetspeak.org/ - some analogue of the notorious Quicksilver for Mac OS X
• Launchy http://www.launchy.net/

Well, the hero of this post:

• Enso http://humanized.com/enso/

A bit of history

I will explain as far as I was able to understand it. Initially, Enso was a strictly commercial project developed by Humanized (founded by Jeffrey Raskin , in which his son later worked). In the future, the company began work on Mozilla Ubiquity (similar to Enso, which is a plug-in for FireFox), which allowed it to make Enso free.

Enso

It is better to see 1 time than read 7 times, the basic features are presented in the following videos:

www.youtube.com/v/JXfjwZw8cj8

www.youtube.com/v/Bs-L63X_xlI
* Sorry, but I could not make a video

Currently, there are two versions of the product on the company's website:

• Version 1 http://humanized.com/enso/

easy to use, but can only do basic things.

setting (as in the second version) occurs through the embeded web server

• Version 2 http://humanized.com/enso/beta/all/ (the rest of this page is a plug-in for Enso)

In this version, a huge number of very useful plug-ins appeared (for example, google search, generation of map objects by a dedicated address ), however, yuzabili fell a little (from my point of view) in terms of the fact that after entering the command, a separate line for entering parameters started to open, that took time, and I had to press enter again

Everything is fine, except that the project on this site seems to be abandoned, which is not quite encouraging to use, however, slazy inside and looking at the implementation, it turned out that everything is written in Python (cross-platform?), As well as the source code is available in free access that cheered up a bit.

In a further search for references to Enso, I came across the community http://www.ensowiki.com , as well as (most importantly) hosting the current version of Enso https://launchpad.net/enso , so what has changed since that time:

• setup is no longer via web server
• cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc)
• first version interface
• almost all plugins from the second version

Use Enso

There is an installer for the installation, so the difficulties are unlikely to occur. Then I needed to set up (now there is an enso \ config.py file for making the settings) of the “main” key (Caps Lock) in the sticking mode (Sticky in the terminology of the program's creators), for this I did the following:

# Whether the Quasimode is actually modal ("sticky").
IS_QUASIMODE_MODAL = True

Expand Enso

Cool, my pet (Enso) is now obedient and affectionate, but I want to teach him to understand the new commands, well, let it be Enso hello world.

I went to the commands folder in the root, where I added the butaji.py file with the following contents:

import enso.config
from enso.messages import displayMessage

def cmd_butaji (ensoapi, cmd):
if cmd == "time" :
ensoapi display_message ( "Hello world" )


cmd_butaji valid_args = [ 'time' ]



And I got the following:





Sumptuously! I think Enso and I will be very good friends.