Overall I find Launchy very useful, but on occasion the list of matches it gives me when I type in a keyword doesn't make sense. In particular the order of it doesn't make sense, because it puts as the top choice something that definitely seems not as good as choice further down.
To give an example, I type in "dir" and it gives me the following choices in order:
Download Dictionaries
IL Disassembler
VisDir
[and more...]
Why is VisDir not the top choice?? I guess there's some sort of fuzzy search happening here but it seems like an exact substring should match higher than a (non-contiguous) subsequence match. Any way to control this / can this be fixed?
Thanks.
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Yes, the search algorithm is a bit dumb at times. It picks items if there are any matching letters, then ranks in the following order:
exact match
usage
fragment
then truncates the list to your chosen maximum.
So, if you've launched IL Disassembler just the once, then it'll put it higher than VisDir.
Really Launchy needs to calculate a score for each item rather than make it an absolute comparison with usage count always winning. Firefox does it right, but they've got a bit more brainpower available to code it up!
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Believe it or not, this is actually a feature in Launchy! you can "train" Launchy by typing a few letters, and then picking the desired result from the list; for example, I have trained it to bring up Firefox as the first result with "f", and Outlook with "o". If you don't see the item you want, just keep typing letters, and launching the program you want to move up the list, so you can type fewer and fewer letters. Or if that isn't working, make sure what you are launching is indexed, and that you are typing the title of the program as it appears in the start menu (assuming you are using XP) {you can also see a better and more detailed description of how to do this in the Launchy readme}
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Overall I find Launchy very useful, but on occasion the list of matches it gives me when I type in a keyword doesn't make sense. In particular the order of it doesn't make sense, because it puts as the top choice something that definitely seems not as good as choice further down.
To give an example, I type in "dir" and it gives me the following choices in order:
Download Dictionaries
IL Disassembler
VisDir
[and more...]
Why is VisDir not the top choice?? I guess there's some sort of fuzzy search happening here but it seems like an exact substring should match higher than a (non-contiguous) subsequence match. Any way to control this / can this be fixed?
Thanks.
Yes, the search algorithm is a bit dumb at times. It picks items if there are any matching letters, then ranks in the following order:
exact match
usage
fragment
then truncates the list to your chosen maximum.
So, if you've launched IL Disassembler just the once, then it'll put it higher than VisDir.
Really Launchy needs to calculate a score for each item rather than make it an absolute comparison with usage count always winning. Firefox does it right, but they've got a bit more brainpower available to code it up!
Believe it or not, this is actually a feature in Launchy! you can "train" Launchy by typing a few letters, and then picking the desired result from the list; for example, I have trained it to bring up Firefox as the first result with "f", and Outlook with "o". If you don't see the item you want, just keep typing letters, and launching the program you want to move up the list, so you can type fewer and fewer letters. Or if that isn't working, make sure what you are launching is indexed, and that you are typing the title of the program as it appears in the start menu (assuming you are using XP) {you can also see a better and more detailed description of how to do this in the Launchy readme}