mouldy.org

Everyone is looking for a better way to launch programs in Windows. Most of these revolve around clicking little tiny icons in the Quick Launch bar or LiteStep. There are a few programs around to extend the Run dialog so that you can type a quick snippet to launch a program - but I've never been able to stick to that for more than a week at a time. You can also program extra buttons on your keyboard to launch programs - but I have far more programs than buttons, and every computer I use has a different keyboard.

My scheme involves using the existing Start menu - so it works without additional software - and simply organising the items so that each item can be accessed with a single keystroke.

Why is this good? For starters, it's easy to learn. The old Start menu is still there if you want to click stuff. If you forget a program's keystroke, you can look at the screen and get a reminder. You can take as long as you want to progressively build up to full efficiency.

Eventually, you'll learn the key sequence for each program. For instance, tapping Win-P-D-P will launch Perforce (Windows-Programs-Development-Perforce). With practice, you can do this without thinking and in a fraction of a second.

Obviously, this isn't going to work in the short term - but the great thing about this scheme is that you can learn it slowly and still benefit in the short term. If you only remember Windows-Programs-Development, you only need to look at the screen once to remember what keystroke Perforce is. And since each program is accessible with a single keystroke, you have no good reason to take your hands off the keyboard. This is a Good Thing (tm) in my world.

The whole system revolves around Unique First Characters (UFCs). All items of a list have Unique First Characters when no two items have the same shortcut key. To give a simple example, all items in the list "apple, banana, carrot" have UFCs, because they all start with different letters. The items in the list "apple, banana, arrange" do not have UFCs, because 'apple' and 'arrange' start with 'a'. If you were to press 'a' to select an item in this list, Windows wouldn't choose an items automatically; it would move to the next item starting with 'a' and wait for you to confirm. Easy, right? :-)

There are three things that you need to do to make this work: remove the default junk from the Start menu, rename the remaining items to have UFCs and organize your programs to have UFCs. For those of us who spend a lot of time SSH-ing into other machines, this can be integrated nicely into the system as well.

Removing the default junk from the Start menu
The default Windows Start menu is a typical committee effort ("Let's add pictures! Yeah! And a music folder! And show recent programs, too! And...") For the experienced Windows user, most of this is useless.

I find this to be a far more useful version:

The items that are listed here are merely those that I find useful. You may prefer to have more shortcuts at the top-level.

To make the top-level Start menu a little more sane:

• Open up Control Panels->Taskbar and Start Menu Properties->Start Menu->Customize (whew!)
• Change 'Number of programs on Start menu' from 6 to 0. If you have different things randomly popping up, this will mess up your key assignments. You probably know what you access most frequently and can put it in manually if you want.
• Uncheck the Internet and E-Mail checkboxes. I use tabbed browsing and leave my email client open all of the time, so it's rare that I actually need to launch either of those programs.

• Fix pretty much every setting in the Advanced tab. Control Panel and My Computer should be a menu. My Documents should be a link. No Favourites, Manufacturer Link, My Music, My Network Places, Network Connections, Printers and Faxed, Run command, Search, Set Program Access and Defaults or System Administrative Tools. Geez, Microsoft. This is awful.

Bask in the relative sanity of your new Start menu.

The most important item here is Programs. It absolutely must have a UFC, or the whole scheme will be ruined.

Renaming top-level Start menu items to have UFCs
Most of the items in the default Start menu start with 'My'. This conflicts nicely with this scheme, and demands that the user use the mouse to choose one. Poor, poor usability. Each of the 'My' items can be right-clicked and renamed. I prefer to change 'My Computer' to 'Volumes' so that it doesn't overlap with 'Control Panel'.

Try it out. Tap Win-V and see how easy it is to get a list of drives. Tap Win-C and see how quickly you get your list of control panels. This is just the beginning!

Organizing programs to have UFCs
This is the boring part. You need to:

• categorize your programs so that you can remember easily which category each program is in
• give each category a name that starts with a UFC
• give each program within each category a UFC

If you've never done this before, I suggest starting by dumping every shortcut in your Start menu into one big folder. Opening up the Start menu in Explorer will make this far less painful.

Delete any that you don't use. Be ruthless. How often do you run HyperTerminal? Get rid of those dumb Uninstall shortcuts. Take the opportunity to fully uninstall any programs that you don't use. You want the list to be short and practical.

It may also be useful to remove shortcuts to programs that you shouldn't be using. I don't put games into my Start menu - the extra effort required to open up Program Files and navigate manually discourages me from playing when I shouldn't be.

Once you're down to a sane list, the shortcuts need to be categorized. The less shortcuts you have, the easier this will be.

I have fairly broad categories like Internet, Development, Music, Accessories and Programs. The distinction between Accessories and Programs, for me, is just in the intended usage of the program - Programs are your major content-creation programs like Word, Excel and Photoshop. Accessories are little bits and pieces like vPod (an iTunes replacement) and OziExplorer (a GPS tool). Internet is anything that works predominantly with the network, like Thunderbird, Firefox, PuTTY and Ethereal.

Once you've sorted the shortcuts into categories, each shortcut needs to have a UFC. The most obvious place to start is with the Microsoft Office shortcuts - remove the 'Microsoft' section of the name so that each application has a short title like 'Word', 'Excel' or 'Outlook'.

Accelerating remote access

I use PuTTY regularly for SSH-ing into remote machines. To handle this nicely, I have a 'Remote' folder within Programs. For each remote machine, I set up a saved connection within PuTTY, and a corresponding shortcut within the Remote folder. The shortcut should point to your PuTTY binary like so:
"C:\Program Files\PuTTY\putty.exe" -load xscale-dev
Substitute your actual PuTTY location, of course.

Once this is done, you can fire up any SSH session without taking your hands off the keyboard or thinking too hard. Win-P-R-X (Windows-Programs-Remote-xscale), and bam, it's on your screen!