Search Backpack from the desktop with Launchy

Posted by Matt Polito in Tutorial on 01 7th, 2008 | one response


Hot on the heels of the 37 signals article about Launchbar… I have created a quick tutorial on how to get the same functionality out of the fantastic Windows application launcher, Launchy.

optionsSo here we go…

First you will need to download Launchy from Sourceforge, if you don’t already use it that is, (current version is 2.0).

Once you are up and running, invoke Launchy by using the keyboard command Alt-Space (unless you have changed the defaults).

Right click on launchy and select Options. An options window will pop up and then go to the Plugins tab.

1. Click on the ‘+’ to add another entry.

2. Add a name to pull the search up as. I used ‘Backpack’, you could use ‘BP’… whatever you want.

3. Click over to the URL column and add your Backpack URL. (http://yourbackpackname.backpackit.com/)

4. In the Query column you will want to add ‘pages/search?term=%s‘. Don’t forget the ‘%s‘ that is what Launchy uses to insert your query string.

5. Hit OK.

That’s it. Now you can invoke Launchy once again and begin typing your search name. For me I begin typing Backpack. It will show up after a few letters and you can then hit tab to complete. You’ll now see a little arrow after Backpack and can type any search you’d like.

backpacksearch

It will pop up your browser and open Backpack’s search with your query. You may have to log into Backpack first. I experienced this, but after that it worked flawlessly.

You can perform these same instructions to get search functionality into Launchy for just about any service that has a search capability. Have fun and I hope this makes life a little easier

Similar Posts:



One Response to “Search Backpack from the desktop with Launchy”

  1. Crash Poetry » Blog Archive » links for 2008-01-29 says:
    January 29, 2008 at 4:24 pm

    [...] Search Backpack from the desktop with Launchy | Matt-O-Matic 3000 [...]

Leave a Reply