Podcasts
Listen to Episode 7 of Mac Power Users to get a great, one hour in-depth review about LaunchBar 5.
Videos
Be more productive
with LaunchBar
Dan Frakes, 2012
Mac Gem: LaunchBar
Jason Snell, 2007
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Switcher’s FAQs
We’ve noticed an ever increasing number of former Quicksilver users who switched over to LaunchBar, so we’d like to provide an overview of some of the differences and to answer the most frequently asked questions in this regard.
Often people don’t realize that pretty much everything you can do with Quicksilver can also be accomplished with LaunchBar, quite often much faster and more reliably, requiring fewer keystrokes.
Applications
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Can I quit applications via LaunchBar?
Yes. If you are currently browsing the list of running applications (via Command-Space/Space or Command-R), just press Command-Q to quit the selected application.
Alternatively, if you’ve selected an application by typing an abbreviation, press Tab and select the “Quit Application” action.
And finally, to quit all currently running applications at once you can use LaunchBar’s “Quit All Applications” action.
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Can I force quit an application via LaunchBar?
Yes. Open the list of running applications (Command-Space/Space or Command-R) and press Command-Option-F to force quit the selected application.
Alternatively, if you’ve selected an application by typing an abbreviation, press Tab and select the “Force Quit Application” action.
Files and Folders
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Can I perform file operations with LaunchBar?
Yes, LaunchBar allows you to perform all sorts of file operations. Files can be moved, copied, renamed, you can create aliases, move them to the trash, assign color labels, open the Get Info window and much more.
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URLs, bookmarks and web searches
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Can I perform web searches with LaunchBar?
Yes, of course. LaunchBar has a customizable set of search templates. Select such a template (e.g. type GOO to select the Google search template, or type WIK to select the Wikipedia template), then press the Space bar and enter your search term.
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What’s the fastest way to perform web searches with LaunchBar?
Select a search template and press Space, or even better, open the search template via Instant Open. For example, assuming you are using the abbreviation “G” to select the Google search template, just press and hold the “G” key.
If you want to perform a web search using a text that’s already selected in another application, you can pass that text to LaunchBar via Instant Send, and then press and hold “G” to perform the search instantly.
Note: Although it’s possible to enter the search term first via “Enter Text” and then press Tab to pass it to a search template, this technique is not recommended since it requires more keystrokes.
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Text
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Can I look up words in Dictionary?
Yes. Select the Dictionary application in LaunchBar and press the Space bar:
Alternatively, select the Look Up in Dictionary service in LaunchBar and press Space:
Or you can send a word that you've selected in an application to LaunchBar via Instant Send, and then forward it to the Look Up in Dictionary action:
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Can I enter arbitrary text?
You can, but you rarely need to. If you want to enter arbitrary text as an action’s argument (e.g. to perform web searches, run scripts or command-line tools, append text to a file, etc.) you just select the target item first (a search template, script, text file, etc.) and then press the Space bar.
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Can I invoke Mac OS X services with text selected in LaunchBar?
Yes. LaunchBar’s Services indexing rule automatically adds all commands from the Mac OS X Services menu to your LaunchBar index.
Services that take a text argument can be invoked in two different ways: You can either select the service first and press Space to enter some text, or select the text first (preferably via Instant Send) and press Tab to send it to the desired service.
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Address Books
Customization
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Can I change the location and the size of the bar?
Yes, click in an empty area of the bar to drag it to your preferred location. Or hold down the Command key to grab it from anywhere else.
You can also adjust the width of the bar from left or right edge.
The LaunchBar window can also be resized using the keyboard by pressing Control-Shift-Left/Right.
Other questions
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Does LaunchBar provide a Calculator?
Yes, LaunchBar has a powerful and extensible scientific Calculator built right in, which allows you to quickly perform numeric calculations directly from the keyboard. Just type Command-Space, type your calculation and press Return.
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Can I run AppleScripts via LaunchBar?
Yes. Select the script and press Return. You can optionally pass arbitrary string arguments to the script by pressing the Space bar. You can also pass file arguments. See the LaunchBar Help chapter “Running AppleScripts” for details.
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What about stability and bugs?
It’s our goal to keep LaunchBar as stable and bug-free as possible. If we receive a bug report, we try to fix the problem as soon as possible. We provide nightly builds to make the latest bug fixes faster available, so you often don’t have to wait for the next official release.
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