LaunchBar offers a full-featured 30-day trial, after which it can continue to be used at no cost. Version 6.15 now supports Shortcuts in Monterey and searching images on Giphy. Almost every dot release added a new feature or increased scope. If that isn't enough, it can be extended further with AppleScript or other scripting languages.ĭon't let the version number fool you: version 6.15 isn't 6.1.5 rather, it's fifteen interim releases since 6.0 appeared in 2014. Control-click a match and a long list of Finder and other contextual items appear to act upon the selection. LaunchBar can also act as a calculator, insert snippets (a la a stripped-down TextExpander), perform live web searches, run a number of provided actions (like converting case or quitting all applications), and drop in emoji. Need a Clipboard history and other related tools? LaunchBar's there for you. The Option view in nearly all items lets you customize results even further. If you never want certain apps to appear as matches, use the Applications index item to uncheck the ones you wanted omitted. You can Control-click any item in the list and choose Disable to remove it from the index. I continue to tweak this list over time, particularly as the developer adds and improves it.įor instance, you might want to avoid Calendar entries, Safari Bookmarks, and songs in your Music library from matching.
Sometimes that can be too much for your needs. A list scrolling down the left-hand side shows everything LaunchBar takes into account when you type into its bar. New users to LaunchBar should start with the LaunchBar Index, accessible via Index Show Index. LaunchBar displays more information about contacts, exposes the innards of an application package, plops you into a file directory's contents, or just provides its reasons for why you're seeing that result. You can also drill down into details for an item by pressing the right-arrow key for almost any match. It also makes it a snap to customize what categories it draws from to return as results and add more. While Spotlight can accomplish some of LaunchBar's tasks and includes others Apple thinks are necessary and you may not, LaunchBar is rapid and shapes itself to your behavior. We were waiting for the release of LaunchBar 6.1 to be able to finalize it.Type Safari and press the right arrow key and SearchBar reveals Safari related items. If you already have a copy of the book, the update for LaunchBar 6 is just about finished. If you haven’t yet used LaunchBar, grab a 30-day demo from the LaunchBar web page.Īnd to learn more, check out my Take Control of LaunchBar. Grab the latest update to LaunchBar – if you already use LaunchBar, invoke the bar (most often this is by pressing Command-Space), click on the rightmost part of the bar to view the LaunchBar menu and choose Check for Updates. I can now press Return, and send these items to iTunes, which will add them to my LaunchBar playlist.īut, as you can see in the list above, there’s so much more you can do. I then pressed Shift-Right-arrow to view the staging area’s contents: Here, I just sub-searched all my Miles Davis songs each time I found one I wanted, I pressed Shift-Down-arrow to add them to the staging area.
They’re each in different locations, and searching in iTunes would have taken a lot longer. I’ve used LaunchBar to search in my iTunes library, finding a few Miles Davis songs I want to listen to. Perform a web search on multiple search engines simultaneously.Send one or more files to multiple email recipients.Select a series of emoji, and insert all of them in one go.Select a couple of songs or albums and play them in iTunes.Select multiple files and send them via email.Today, Objective Development has released LaunchBar 6.1, and, with it, a sixth superpower: the Staging Area.Īs Objective Development points out, “Staging is a technique that allows you to create multiple selections in LaunchBar and to act on all of these items at once.” Instead of just acting on a single file in LaunchBar, you can select multiple items from any location. In this book, I outline LaunchBar’s five superpowers: Abbreviation Search, Browsing, Sub-search, Send To and Instant Send. It’s the first utility that I install on every new Mac with LaunchBar installed, I can get on with everything else I need to do.” “I’ve been using LaunchBar for nearly as long as it has been around on the Mac. I like it so much, I wrote a book about it: Take Control of LaunchBar. LaunchBar is the first tool I install on a new Mac.
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