A while ago I talked to Justin about this, and he came up with some weird Windows trick that I brushed off. Today I found the solution to something I’ve been trying to find for quite some time. And I love it.

I have… a bizarre folder topology on my hard drive. Which is to say that I don’t embrace the “My Documents” schema barely at all and there are folders all over my hard drive that I have to “get to” on a regular basis. “Normal people” (i.e. mouse people) would tell me to just make a shortcut on the desktop, but I’m not normal, and I’m not a mouse lover at all. I admit I use the mouse more and more with every passing day, but with fingers that can hit 120 words-per-minute with enough coffee in me, I still go to the mouse as little as I can.

To my delight this morning, I found a silly little single-minded utility called RunFast. It sits in the tray and consumes a measley five megs of memory. It is activated by either clicking or hitting Ctrl-R. When the window pops up, you type either one of the pre-defined shortcuts, or one that you’ve entered yourself, that references either a program, a folder, or a web page.

So now, I can hit Ctrl-R, type dl, hit enter, and my downloads folder opens instantly.

I can hit Ctrl-R, type blog, hit enter, and Firefox opens with the very site you are reading right now.

I can hit Ctrl-R, type tb, hit enter, and Thunderbird opens instantly. It’s awesome. It’s like having a simple command-line interface on the desktop that I can configure to do what I want.

The examples are endless. If you can make a Windows shortcut to it, you can set up an alias in Runfast.

It is simply awesome. And it’s completely free.

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