Web Productivity Winning Duo: Launchy + keyword bookmarks

This tweak is a little more involved than most I put up, but it is totally worth it. When done, you can fire off any custom web search from Launchy!

Here are the steps (I assume you have Launchy installed and know what a keyword bookmark is):

Make Firefox 3 keep a bookmark file

One moderately annoying change in Firefox 3 is that your bookmarks are no longer saved to a file (they go into Firefox’s sqlite DB). This means Launchy can’t index your bookmarks file and make them available. You can change a setting, however, that will cause Firefox to create the bookmarks file. To do that, open a new Firefox tab, put “about:config” in the address bar, and press enter. You might get a warning about the settings being potentially dangerous, just click Ok, our change is safe. Now in the provided search bar, enter “bookmarks.auto”, and double click the setting to toggle it to true:

Add a desired keyword bookmark if you don’t have one

You should have made massive quantities of keyword bookmarks by now, if you have read my post on their virtues. If not, make a test one like:

Restart Firefox

You must restart Firefox, as the bookmark file export only happens on exit.

Make Launchy index your home folder

Now you need to have Launchy index your Home folder files. This is handy even aside from the bookmarks tweak, as you can search and open any local files with Launchy. To do this, invoke Launchy (alt + space unless you changed it), and right click anywhere in the Launchy window that isn’t text. Click “Options” in the menu that appears. Then go to the Catalog tab, press the “+” beneath Directories, browse to and open “C:\Users\YOURUSER”. Once that is added, click on the directory you added, put “*.*” in the box under File Types, then press the “+” beneath that to add it:

To make sure the files are immediately available, click “Rescan Catalog” at the bottom of the same Catalog tab.

Now, invoke Launchy, type your keyword for your desired bookmark (if it’s not the first match, give it a moment, you can select from the drop down), press the tab key, enter your search term, and press enter: