New tool I made for Vista: Start++

by Brandon on February 22nd, 2007

UPDATE

Lots of people are linking to this post. A much better place to link would be to the new Start++ web site. Thanks!

I’ve decided to share a little tool that I wrote on a whim a week or two ago for Vista. This is a personal project of mine, not related to MS in any way.

Users of WDS on XP may recall the “Deskbar Shortcuts” functionality that allows you to create little aliases between words or characters with commands and searches. For example, you could set up the Deskbar so that you could type “g Stuff” to search for the work “Stuff” on Google. You could also launch programs, run scripts with parameters, and more.

Windows Vista replaced the Deskbar with Instant Search built-in to the Start menu, which is totally awesome. Unfortunately, it lacks all of that fun shortcut functionality that the Deskbar had. Unless you have my tool, which for the time being I’m calling Start++.

Here are a few of things it does:

This will open the “Longhorn Server” page on Wikipedia.

This will launch Visual Studio with administrator permissions.

Start++ also works from the command line!

Search Actions let you perform actions over search results. In this case, “Play Radiohead” will:

perform a search for music with the keyword “radiohead”
Write all the results to a .M3U file
Open the results in Media Player

That’s the configuration UI, which lets you create your own custom commands / aliases.

Like I said, this is kind of something I threw together, so it might still have some bugs, and I’ll probably add more to it when I get the time on weekends and such. Anyway, let me know what you think.

Download Start++

From Life of Brandon

118 Comments →

Kunal permalink

This is just awesome. I’ve really been missing the aliases feature from WDS ever since I migrated over to Vista, and this adds the missing piece back in, along with command shell integration and Search Actions.

Very cool, Brandon. I’m using it already, and will be watching for future updates.
Petar Smilajkov permalink

What can I tell you man! SIMPLY AWESOME

Let me know if I can redistribute it over my site. I know in the license it says I cannot redistribute it – but surely I’d like to help out + It’s a lot nicer when people can just click and download straight from my site

Cheers,
Petar
http://www.VistaJuice.com
peteremcc permalink

This is a great idea, but I already have Opera set up with all my various shortcuts exactly like this.

If you could figure out a way to import the Opera search file into Start++ so I don’t have to enter them all (lots!) again, that would be brilliant.
Suren permalink

searches with spaes in them are not working, only the first word gets sent to the web browser.

ie. g longhorn server searches google for longhorn only, not longhorn server.

thanks
Moishe Lettvin permalink

Awesome!
Justin Carter permalink

This is awesome. I always wished IE7 had the same support for commands like this, the same way Opera does, but I think this tool takes it one step further, and then some! The search actions are VERY cool Congrats on the great work. I don’t think I’ll *ever* have another Vista installation that doesn’t have this installed as well!
Brandon permalink

Suren – thanks for catching that! I have updated the installer to version 0.2.2.

It includes a fix for that problem, allowing you to use the %+ substition in order to fill in the parameters with +’s instead of spaces between them. I also changed the default commands to use that when appropriate.

However, if you already installed the old version, you WILL NEED to update the query strings YOURSELF. That just means launching the app and replacing %* with %+ for the web search commands (But not Wikipedia).
Daniel permalink

I use both FireFox (for the Internet, default browser) and IE7 (for our Intranet). I’d like to do a search for people on our Intranet using IE7, but when I put a simple search of:

“E:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” “http://intranet/search/index.php?name=%+”

it tells me “SYstem cannot find the file specified”. I assume this is because it’s trying to run the whole line? Can the program be modified so just the first parameter is the exe? Am I making sense?

Excellent program though!! Very useful…
Janson permalink

Great stuff Brandon, I had almost forgotten about this functionality but found it really useful back in Windows XP deskbar days. Are you also still working on your sidebar gadget for search??? Any other news of any potential Vista PowerToys in the wings?

Thanks for giving this to the community.

Cheers

Janson
unq permalink

very nice app …
but i think that “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%*” is better search string for wikipedia, because without “Special:Search” it will try to load article with that exact name and will not search for it if it not exists

sry for my english and tnx again
Brandon permalink

Thanks Daniel and Unq. I’ll update the app this weekend with those suggestions / fixes =)
P Cause permalink

I created a search action that is:

kind:contact %*

and set it to open results. I guess I’ve had expected it to open matching contact items. Didn’t even show contact items. Am I missing something?

It did show a “program” with the start++ logo and my parameters at the top of the results.
Brandon permalink

P Cause -

I tried the same thing, and it worked contacts that were stored in Windows Contacts. However, contacts stored in Outlook won’t work, as the current code only knows how to open file-system results.

I’ll add that to my list of features to add, though.

Were your contacts stored in Outlook or some other app? (OE, Thunderbird, etc)?
P Cause permalink

Thanks for the reply. My contacts were stored in Outlook.

An idea: how about allowing the search results to be passed as arguments to a batch / PowerShell file? Other search actions I’d love to see are print and “show results in explorer” which gives does the search in the file explorer that Win+F would bring up.

Thanks for the great app.
Brandon permalink

I thought of print but that one scares me a bit, so I’d want to at least figure out some kind of confirmation UI so you know what you’re going to print

As for launching a search in explorer, you can already do that. I didn’t do it originally because it’s not very useful from the start menu (it already does searching!). But from the command-line it would be. So try making a Simple Command called “search” or something, with the command “search-ms:query=%*” and that should do what you want.
Jiri Fiala permalink

Thanks Brandon, you’ve made my day with Start++! Search is my No.1 feature in Vista, whoever decided it would sit in Start menu should be promoted.
Marco permalink

Wow, looks a whole lot like OIHOI
Chiefbutz permalink

This looks like something that would be nice for XP…
xxdesmus permalink

Brilliant idea my friend…I look forward to see the progress you make on this.
Nishanth permalink

“Launchy” is a nice tool for windows XP users. You can get it from here
http://www.launchy.net/#donate
Fede777 permalink

This is awesome, is there anything like that for XP besides launchy an WDS
Tobbi permalink

Hey, it’s a great Tool.
You surf with Opera, right?!
Diego Cogo permalink

This software is awesome! Very useful! I’m already addicted to it! Thanks!
Brandon permalink

Tobbi -

Nope, I use Maxthon. I’m pretty sure Opera took their alias feature (like most of their features) from Maxthon or Avant.
Jeff permalink

OK I feel dumb that I cannot get it working. I can make it work from the run command, but not from the search within the start menu. if i type “g bananas” or something and hit enter, it will open Search Results in Indexed locations. But like I said, it works fine from the run window. Am i glancing over that I don’t hit enter, is there another “hot key” i need to hit?
Brandon permalink

Jeff –

Enter should work. When you type “g banana” – look at the top of the Start menu. You should see “g banana” under Programs, and it should have the Start++ icon. That should be the selected item by default. There are rare cases where another shortcut in your start menu could be on top, but the “See All Results” link should never be selected.

I also can’t see any reason why it would work from the Run box but not the search box, since they’re doing the same thing.
Jeff permalink

Brandon:

I tried for kicks changing the google trigger to ‘google’, no change. I also uninstalled and reinstalled it, however it seems that upon reinstall my google trigger was still ‘google’ not ‘g’. If i have a corrupt install, and run the uninstaller, there’s something somewhere saving my user-defined triggers? (your folder in program files disappeared, i don’t know where else to look).

For the yahoo search command though, which i didn’t change and it’s still “y”, when i type “y bananas” this is what i get:

http://img355.imageshack.us/img355/7448/testestjs7.jpg

Just a few archived msn chats where i guess i mentioned bananas or something.
Again, opening the run box and typing “y bananas” works though.
Brandon permalink

It looks like you modified your Start Menu settings and disabled the “Search Programs” option. You’ll need to re-enable that for the current version of Start++ to work (actually won’t be necessary in the next one).
Jeff permalink

Hah, that was it, thank you!
Jeff permalink

oh and looking forward to the next version
Haacked permalink

Nicely done! I’ve been waiting for something like this.
Johannes Rössel permalink

Hello Brandon,

I stumbled over this nifty little tool but already have a few issues.
First of all, what some others already mentioned, the “play ” doesn’t work if your user name has spaces in it; I saw no simple fix in the serach query.
Second, could you include an option to enable or disable the queries to work on commandline. Start++ ships with a “dir” command which is greatly disturbing if one is working in cmd on a regular basis and don’t get the dir listing but something different and entirely not on the commandline.

Regards,
Johannes
Ariel permalink

Hi,

Can i use this to launch an MSN messenger chat to a specific contact?

Thanks
afthab permalink

good
Diego permalink

Brandon, I use the deskbar shortcuts, Ctrl+Enter and Shift+Enter maybe two thousand times a day, and I find that I don’t miss the command prompt most of the time The day I installed Vista I found that the lack of this funcionality was the only thing about Vista I could never get used to.

In short: THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!
Mads Foli Bjerre permalink

Brandon, excellent, excellent utility. How about setting up a PayPal donate button? I for one would donate just so you could buy a new icon that matches the new Vista smoochieness…
Ralph permalink

Hi,

Can you help me, creating ctrl S for saving documents in Vista?
Alex permalink

Thank You
tobster permalink

Brandon, what a great little tool, got almost everything at the touch of justa few buttons, awsome. thanks matey, keep up the gopod work
Tom permalink

It’s rare in today’s world that someone designs something that is fresh and new. You have done that, sir. My hat is off to you. You are truly an artist.
yprositdjy permalink

Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! rgqpzgvdklej
Al Caudullo permalink

Brandon
I have just started working with Vista and I want to add additional menu items to Media Center. How can I do it?
Dave permalink

Is there any way to implement the searching style of launchy? With launchy to run Windows Media Player “WMP” could be used, or any combination of letters included in the name (in order). another example was firfox a simple “fx” would start it. Great work though
Great Googly Moogly permalink

Well… I’ve used this solution ever since the Win2K days. I added “C:\shortcuts” to my %PATH% environment variable, and then I put tersely named shortcuts to my programs therein, like “ps” for Photoshop, “f” for Firefox, “mc” for My Computer, etc. etc… I start all my programs this way (Win+R); I don’t use the Desktop, Quick Launch or the Start menu.

So this functionality has already been in Windows, but I guess it’s OK for those who don’t know about it anyway.
Brandon permalink

#87 – That’s actually a very, very small subset of what Start++ does. That solution does not allow you to substitute parameters into the command or arguments, execute a command elevated, run a script over search results, or embed UI in the start menu.
Great Googly Moogly permalink

Yeah, it does if you use .cmd/.bat (using %1, etc.), but I suppose it’s good for non-tinkering dudes to have the functionality presented in a more obvious way.
Great Googly Moogly permalink

Not the search results thing though, that’s very true.
(For example, to run as elevated, you only have to make a shortcut calling runas /user:administrator /savecred “%1″ as base. /savecred makes it so you only have to type your password once: or, you could just use sysinternals’ PSExec )

It wasn’t my intention to ridicule this program or the author’s efforts — it’s obviously a well-executed application — I merely wanted to point out that Windows can be more powerful without needing heavy modification than people realise. Also, since I’ve used the Start++ way to start ALL my programs for about, oh, 7 years now, it’s safe to say I think it’s THE way to optimise your workflow
Brandon permalink

GGM -

I know, I just wanted to clarify things. Also, you CANNOT use “runas” to elevate a process. The “runas” command you suggested will run the process as the built-in Administrator account, not the currently logged in account.

Also, saving credentials to the local Admin account isn’t a very secure practice (if it even works, not sure it’s supported anymore on Vista).
John L. Galt permalink

Brandon, thanks for a completely indispensable tool for Vista. I loathe having to create shortcuts for elevated privileges and pinning them to the Start Menu – I loathe having to use the start menu via a mouse in the first place. Sure, I can hit the Windows key, then use the letters / arrow keys to select what I want.

But, that does not even come close to compare to using [WinKey], typing sudo {appname} and hitting enter – a perfect combination, especially as I continually write Manifest files for legacy apps that don’t have them (neither embedded nor in the program tree) with Notepad and this makes it that much easier – I can now save them directly to the program tree without having to go through any extra other steps!

Marvelous!

As an aside, I used to use another app with similar capabilities with regards to shortcuts for loading particular websites, performing searches and what not – Dave’s QuickSeach Deskbar. This is my new replacement for that faithful old friend.

Thank you for writing such an ingenious app!
Hunter permalink

I have written a start menu replacement for XP called Open Menu+ that has the same quick search feature like Vista. In the next major version, I’m planning to have support for search plugins. Would you consider helping me add Start++ to Open Menu+ to make it available on XP?

New tool I made for Vista: Start++

UPDATE

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