So my friend Nik asked me something about emulating launchbar and quicksilver on the mac, where you can basically type a command at the mac and it will figure out what you're looking for with pattern matching.

This won't do that. Not by a long shot. ; )

The thing he asked me was about the windows run menu, and getting things to run from there with simple commands.

If you're on a windows box, you can do the following:
hold down the windows key,
press 'R'
type 'calc'
hit enter.

Bam! you've got the calculator. Well.. that's handy and all.. but what if you want your own programs in there.

Nik pointed me to the PATH environment variable as the place to change what the run menu searches in.

If you know what your environment variables are, then you probably don't need my hand holding. I added one that points to My Documents\bin\ as I preserve my my documents folder across formats, and I like to keep everything there.

For the rest of you. There's already an environment variable in there pointing to your systemroot. that's C:\Windows\

If you go there, and drop any windows shortcut in that directory, the name of that shortcut becomes the keyword you enter in "run".

Yay! Make a shortcut that points to photoshop, name it 'ps' and put it in C:\Windows\

Then, windowskey-R, type 'ps', hit enter BAM! Photoshop! I'm never going to use my mouse again!

UPDATE

I hadn't a clue how cool this would have been!
1. It passes arguments along.. so.. i made a shortcut called 'ff' that points to firefox. if i use the command 'ff google' firefox opens up and runs google. also, because firefox is soo damned smart, if it's already running, it'll just put google in a new tab.

2. you can do shortcuts to sites. take a firefox shortcut and add a url as an argument after 'firefox.exe'. That pretty much give limitless capacity for web application shortcuts.

3. firefox will take multiple arguments. guess what
"ff aaronpropst.com google.com" does... ; )

Adobe Acrobat thinks I only use my computer for viewing pdfs. Apple thinks my computer is used solely for syncing my ipod. Install Shield thinks it is necessary to run in the background so that it can check for urgent updates to god knows what. Ooohh.. and don't even get me started on quicktime, and realmedia.

All of these people think they need to leave a process running in memory on my system.. 24.. 7.. 365.

Um... guys.. if all of you do that... what is left for ME to use?

Spyware is generally the reason most people start having trouble with their computers after a couple years and either buy a new one, or tap their social network for the nearest geek at hand to help them reformat. The thing is, this kind of crap is equally responsible. After 2 years, you've done so many things with your computer, and installed so many programs, about 30% of which leave some worthless hunk of code running in memory so their program will start faster, or update on its own, or whatever.

The computer is a tool. It's probably the most extensible and versatile tool in human history. You can do any number of things with a computer, but not if it's busy downloading garbage on your behalf, or checking for updates, or scanning for aliens, or grabbing the latest maps of azeroth.

So, software people.. (adobe, i'm looking in your direction*) Quit it! You're creating software at the program level for a reason! So we can run your program, and when we want to do something else, we can close your program! Otherwise we'd call your shit 'drivers' or an "operating system"

Ways to take control:

download process explorer This app used to be offered by a site called sysinternals, which recently got acquired by microsoft. : (
process explorer gives you a list of all running processes on your system similar to the windows task manager, but wayyyy more descriptive. So, for instance, instead of just seeing the exe name, it will give you its full path and supporting files.. so you can see who's it is. (and kill it.)

click start: run: type 'msconfig' This is a kickass built in app that allows you to see and disable all the crap you don't need at startup. You should use a bit of caution of course, as you could remove something you need, or kill your system's normal startup process. Experiment though.. that's what safe mode is for. ; )