Ride the Rocket!

Computer slowing you down?

LaunchPad lets you use your keyboard to

start programs
open files
view folders
launch web sites

 way faster than using a mouse:

Description

LaunchPad is an application launcher for Windows written in Liberty BASIC. It is designed to radically increase the speed with which you can accomplish familiar tasks, and to increase access to programs that are hidden behind Windows' maze of menus.

It begins with HotKeyPlus, a companion program bundled with this installation. Press Control-J and the LaunchPad window appears. Type your request and press enter. LaunchPad then goes to work, executing the command that matches your request in the launch.lpf file.

LaunchPad is flexible. You tell it what commands to use, what programs to run, what documents to open, what directories to view, what sites to launch. It does the rest.

LaunchPad is simple. Did you see the interface?

LaunchPad is lean. It uses less than 2 MB of memory.

LaunchPad is powerful. It comes pre-configured, ready to launch all sorts of goodies hidden in Windows. Some Windows programs, such as msconfig and regedit, can only be accessed through the command line.

LaunchPad is smart. It understands that you may work at multiple computers. You can use one command to launch a program that has different locations and even different file names on different computers. There's no need to maintain separate data files for separate machines.

LaunchPad is portable. Just copy a single text file to another computer running LaunchPad, and you're good to go.

LaunchPad comes with references:

LaunchPad is free. This is an open source project, powered by Liberty BASIC and Hot Key Plus.
 

Download LaunchPad v1.3
(includes Liberty BASIC source code)
 

Source Code

About

Built-In Commands

• Site launch: Type an Internet address, such as runbasic.com in the LaunchPad window, and it loads your browser with that address -- nothing needs to be in the data file. No need to enter http:// or www. for common domains.

• edit or list or the letter "L"- opens the launch.lpf file for viewing or editing.

• help or options launches this page in your browser

• about launches the About page in your browser

Structure of launch.lpf

• The launch.lpf file contains two types of variables: requests and commands. Here is a sample. To add or edit requests and their associated commands, enter "list" or "edit" or simply the letter "L" in the LaunchPad window and hit enter. The launch.lpf file appears, ready for editing. Data is formatted like this:

(blank line) request command (blank line) request command (blank line) request command (blank line)

• Requests

  • are what you type into the LaunchPad window and are also located in the launch.lpf file

  • must be preceded by a blank line

  • must be unique: If you use the request "wrd" once in launch.lpf, do not use it again.

  • can be as short as a single character or as long as you like.

  • can contain spaces.

  • LaunchPad treats all requests as lower case, so there is no reason to use capital characters.

• Commands

  • are what you want the computer to do

  • are preceded by a 1-line request in the launch.lpf file

  • http://  should precede web address commands

  • you can have up to 3 commands for each request. This is handy when you want, for example, to launch a word processor on 3 different computers, each of which contain different word processors located in different folders with different file names. If the first command doesn't work, LaunchPad tries the next and then the next, looking for one that works.

• launch.lpf rules:

  • No single lines of text.

  • Just 1 blank line between requests and commands.

  • 10 or so blank lines at end of launch.lpf (just hit enter several times).

  • LaunchPad will read up to 5,000 lines in launch.lpf (that's over 1,000 requests!)

Adding Commands to launch.lpf

• To add commands from shortcuts on your desktop or from entries in the Start > Programs menu:

  • right-click on the item

  • select Properties

  • under the shortcut tab copy the text in the "target" window

  • paste this into launch.lpf as a command

• To tell LaunchPad to open a file or run a program that you see in Windows Explorer, place the path and file name on the command line. For example:
                 c:\ernie\files\book.pdf
                 c:\suzy\documents\car repairs.docx
                 c:\program files\liberty basic.exe

• To tell LaunchPad to open a folder, place the following blue text (be sure to include the comma) before the path of the folder. Like this:
  explorer.exe /e, /root,c:\program files\libertybasic

• For internet addresses, paste the address onto a command line in the launch.lpf file. Internet addresses should be preceded by http://

Run Commands

Windows responds to hundreds of commands that do just about anything that you can do with a mouse . . . and more. Many of these are pre-loaded in the launch.lpf file in the "RUN COMMANDS" section. There are simply too many to list here. Instead, it is recommended that you search "run commands" on the internet, and explore. Just paste the command into launch.lpf and add a request line.

Use on Multiple Computers

If you work with more than one computer, you probably have identical programs (such as MS Word) that are located in different directories on different machines. No problem! LaunchPad allows you to stack up to three commands for one request, like this:

LaunchPad tries to execute the first command, and if that doesn't work, it attempts, the second, and so forth. Once you've set up launch.lpf, all you need to do from any machine is enter the one request, e.g. word, and LaunchPad starts MS Word using different instructions for different computers.

Remarks

• It's O.K. to put in one or more lines of remarks after the final command for a request. It might look like this:

• You can also place two or more remark lines in your file, separated by single blank lines from your data. It might look like this:

Arguments

Many programs need to be run with command line arguments to load properly. For example:
                   C:\Program Files\RunBasic\rbp.exe rb.im
To tell LaunchPad that rb.im is an argument, simply replace the space immediately following the executable file with a hash mark (#) as follows:
                   C:\Program Files\RunBasic\rbp.exe#rb.im

Hot Key

LaunchPad is started by HotKeyPlus, set to the Ctrl - j hotkey combination. To change the hotkey in HotKeyPlus, right-click on the rocket icon in the taskbar and select "Configuration."

Data file Backup

The launch.lpf file is a plain text file that is best edited using notepad. A more sophisticated word processor could add formatting to this file and corrupt it. A copy of the original launch.lpf file that came with LaunchPad can be found here.

Download LaunchPad v1.3
(includes Liberty BASIC source code)
 

Source Code

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