I’m a great believer in the power of the keyboard as a productivity tool. Mice are great pointing devices, and if you spend your day working with graphics then they’re probably your best friend. But for people like me who mainly deal in words, whenever our hands leave the keyboard it’s both a waste of time and an interruption to the flow of thought.

Another criticism of the mouse as a control device is that it’s fundamentally serial access rather than random access. To perform a function you need to move the pointer from A to B via all pixels in between. Keyboard shortcuts allow you to effectively jump through a wormhole to your destination.

As a Mac user I’m pretty lucky, OSX supports the keyboard pretty well out of the box. However not quite well enough for me, so I looked for ways to make it even better.

Probably the most well known keyboard handler on the Mac is Quicksilver. Unfortunately I felt about this the way I do about the TV show The Office: I admire it, I can see why people love it, but it just doesn’t work for me. There’s nothing wrong with Quicksilver, you might like to give it a try. It just wasn’t quite what I wanted – possibly it’s too powerful.

Instead I use LaunchBar from Objective Development. This wonderful utility does just what I need and a little bit more.

As the name suggests, LaunchBar is at heart an application launcher. Once it’s running you call it up with a hotkey (I use Apple-space) and a small bar appears at the top of the screen. Type a few letters of the app you want to fire up, press Enter and that’s it. And it’s not just Apps of course, you can launch documents, address book entries, web pages etc as well.

What I really like about LaunchBar is the way that it “learns”. Initially it indexes your machine (you can configure this) and looks for matching names. This itself is quite clever – it automatically recognises initials as an abbreviation or multi-word filenames. However for most people that still leaves a lot of potential matches. So the program keeps track of which apps and files you use most often and puts them nearer the top of the list using something called “adaptive abbreviation search technology (AASv4)”. If you prefer you can also specify your own abbreviations.

That’s the core of LaunchBar. Other little touches include a simple calculator, dictionary lookup etc. These are nice but are essentially icing on the cake of what for me is a must-have productivity tool.

Transparency statement: I have no connection with Objective Development other than as a satisfied customer