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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:

  1. perform a search for music with the keyword “radiohead”
  2. Write all the results to a .M3U file
  3. 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

119 Comments
  1. 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. 🙂

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. 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!

  6. 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).

  7. 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…

  8. 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

  9. 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

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

  11. 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.

  12. 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)?

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. 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.

  16. Marco permalink

    Wow, looks a whole lot like OIHOI

  17. This looks like something that would be nice for XP…

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

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

  20. This is awesome, is there anything like that for XP besides launchy an WDS

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

  22. Diego Cogo permalink

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

  23. Tobbi –

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

  24. 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?

  25. 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.

  26. 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.

  27. 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).

  28. Jeff permalink

    Hah, that was it, thank you! 🙂

  29. Jeff permalink

    oh and looking forward to the next version 🙂

  30. Nicely done! I’ve been waiting for something like this.

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. VistaJuice
  2. Canucky.net » Posts » Start++ - Extend Windows Vista Search Functionality
  3. fs-studio blog » Start++ - First Vista Powertoy?
  4. Start++: Add Keyword Searches to Vista’s Start Menu - CyberNet News
  5. Start++ for Windows Vista » D’ Technology Weblog — Technology, Blogging, Gadgets, Fashion, Life Style.
  6. Power Up Your Start Menu Search Box in Windows Vista :: the How-To Geek
  7. 웹초보의 Tech 2.1 - 디지털 2.0 + 아날로그 0.1 » 비스타 검색창을 200% 활용하는 Start++
  8. The CTRAN weblog » Blog Archive » Start ++
  9. Making Vista’s Search More Useful at The Cheezy Blog
  10. Lifehacker
  11. Blog Mirrors » Download of the Day: Start++ (Windows Vista)
  12. arturogoga » Mejorando el menú de inicio de Windows Vista con Start++
  13. Vista Tips Start++ | EndeNeu - The greatest thing, since bread came sliced
  14. Vista: Start++ « All Vista World
  15. cheerleaderdeathsquad » Blog Archive » Vista Deskbar
  16. Bitelia » Start++, barra de búsqueda con vitaminas (Vista)
  17. links for 2007-03-01 « LAN b4 Time
  18. » First Great Windows Vista PowerToy: Start++ »  InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel
  19. shahine.com/omar/

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