Work with Applications

In this chapter, I’ll tell you how to launch applications with an abbreviation search, superpower #1, and how LaunchBar learns from your abbreviations to streamline app launching. I’ll also show you how to assign abbreviations to your apps.

Then, I’ll look at how you can access your applications’ data and files using the Five Superpowers that I discussed in the previous chapter. I’ll also discuss Switching Applications in LaunchBar.

Abbreviation Search

The gateway method of using LaunchBar, and an example of its first and most important superpower, is abbreviation-searching to launch or switch to an application. In fact, I’ve found that this is the only way many faithful LaunchBar users use it—they figure they’ve gotten their money’s worth and fail to learn the thousand-or-so other features that LaunchBar offers. I’m sure that once you learn all of LaunchBar’s superpowers you’ll do much more than that!

Launching applications—and carrying out any other abbreviation search—can be broken down into the following steps:

1. Invoke the bar by pressing your LaunchBar keyboard shortcut (Figure 7). The icon and text in your bar may be different from what’s shown in the figure; you’ll see whatever you last selected in LaunchBar.
   

   Figure 7: The LaunchBar bar. Top: The bar as it displays when you invoke it. Bottom: The bar showing the results of typing SAF. (Some of the items in this figure are search templates and actions.

2. Type a few letters of the name of the application you want to launch. (For example, to launch Safari, try typing SAF.)
3. LaunchBar may guess exactly what you want to open, putting that item at the top of its results. If not, simply arrow to the desired app by pressing the down-arrow key.
4. When you’ve selected the item you want to access, press Return.

Your Mac opens or switches to the selected application.

If you type the same abbreviation and select the same result a few times, LaunchBar learns what you mean with that abbreviation. Once LaunchBar understands your abbreviation, you’ll never need to press an arrow key again for that item.

For example, in a new user account I set up to use when writing this book, I invoked LaunchBar, and typed CH to open the Google Chrome Web browser. The first hit in the initial results list was Chess. I pressed the down-arrow key to select Chrome, then pressed Return. The next time I invoked the bar and pressed CH, Chrome was the first hit.

Remember, In addition to finding applications, an abbreviation search can zero in on anything that LaunchBar indexes: files, contacts, iTunes songs, Web bookmarks, snippets, actions, services, and more.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this ebook has a Cheat Sheet, which you can download in order to put it on a different device or open it in a separate window.

Assign Custom Abbreviations

While LaunchBar’s Adaptive Abbreviation Search algorithm automatically learns from what you type, you may want to kick-start it at times, especially for a non-standard abbreviation. For example, if you want to use WB for your favorite Web browser—Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or another—it will take a lot of mousing to get to one of these in LaunchBar’s results list, if the desired result appears at all.

Luckily, it’s easy to assign custom abbreviations. First, find any item in LaunchBar’s results list; it’s easiest to find it with an abbreviation search using the first few characters of its name (but, if necessary, it’s okay to navigate extensively with the arrow keys before you finally select the item you want). Then press Command-Option-A (or click the item’s name in the bar, and choose Assign Abbreviation in the Action menu) to bring up the Assign Abbreviation field (Figure 8). Enter your selected abbreviation and press Return. The next time you type that abbreviation, the item you assigned it to will be the first result.

You can assign an abbreviation to an item that contains none of that item’s letters, if you wish. For instance, if you change your preferred Web browser regularly, you might want to assign the abbreviation WB (for Web Browser) to whatever app is your current favorite, rather than typing a few letters of the app’s name.

To change an assigned abbreviation, or to switch an assigned abbreviation to a different app, run through the above steps again, entering a new abbreviation or selecting a different application.

Instant Open

Once you’ve mastered the basic abbreviation search, and you have a few abbreviations working consistently, it’s time to take out a step, that of pressing the Return key. This works only when the item you want to find is the first one in the results list (whether because it’s naturally the first result or because you’ve trained LaunchBar to use a specific abbreviation).

Here’s what you do:

1. Invoke LaunchBar.
2. Type the abbreviation for an application. I’ll use Safari as an example here; my abbreviation is SAF.
3. When you get to the F key, press and hold it for a moment rather than immediately releasing the key. (The amount of time you need to hold the final key depends on a system-wide Delay Until Repeat setting. You can adjust this in the Keyboard preference pane in System Preferences. If you want Instant Open to work as quickly as possible, set the Delay Until Repeat to Short.)

Your application, or other item, opens right away.

Browsing

You’ve seen that you can access an item like an application, contact, or file by typing an abbreviation and finding its name in the LaunchBar results list. For example, as I write this book in Pages, I can type PG to find the Pages application, then press Return to launch it.

But, imagine that I want to work with an app by opening a file in a case where an abbreviation search doesn’t make sense. Maybe I don’t know the name. Maybe I want to open one of fifty files with nearly the same name. Or open all the files in a folder. Or get at data that’s not exactly a file. You can handle all these situations—and more—with ease, using superpower #2: browsing. Let’s look at some common examples.

Opening a Recent Document

I put this example first, because it is easy to understand, but also because this basic technique works for many items that you may want to find by browsing. Say you want to open a file that you’ve opened recently, but it seems unlikely that LaunchBar would put it high in an abbreviation-search results list. And, you don’t want to establish an abbreviation for opening that file quickly in the future, because you don’t open it often.

Here are the basics of browsing for an application’s recent files:

1. Invoke the bar by pressing your LaunchBar keyboard shortcut.
2. Type a few letters to bring up the application you want (Figure 9). If necessary, arrow up or down to select the app in the results list.
   

   Figure 9: Opening a file by browsing an app’s recently opened list. Top: After invoking the bar and typing an abbreviation, select the app and press the Space bar or the right-arrow key. Bottom: LaunchBar displays the recently opened items. In this case, three recent files are available to open with TextEdit.

   Note: You can’t access recently opened documents from all apps. For example, Microsoft Office applications and Photoshop don’t show recent documents. This has nothing to do with LaunchBar, but rather with the way these applications store recent document information.

3. Press the Space bar or right-arrow key to browse the list of recent files for that application.
4. Use the down-arrow key to select a file. (If the list is long, whittle it down by typing a couple of letters with a Sub-search.)
5. Press Return to open the selected file.

The file opens in that application.

Browsing the File System

While browsing an app’s recent documents can be a quick way of accessing files you’ve used recently, what about other files that you may not have opened in months, or files you want to open with applications that LaunchBar can’t browse? (For example, you can’t access Microsoft Office files by browsing Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.) By browsing your Mac’s file system, you can flit in and out of your folders and find any file, almost as fast as a speeding bullet.

A simple way to begin browsing your Mac’s file system is to start at your home folder; that’s the one with the house icon and your username, though you could start at any folder you like. Invoke the bar and type HOME. Select Home ~ — Indexing Rule (with the house icon; it should be near or at the top of the list) and press either the Space bar or the right-arrow key. You see a list of the items within your home folder, as in Figure 10.

Arrow down to select a folder; then to enter a folder and view its contents, press either the Space bar or the right-arrow key. If you want to move back up in the file system hierarchy, press the left-arrow key.

You can keep arrowing through your file system until you find a file you want to open, and then do one of the following:

• Press Return to open the file with its assigned application.
• Press Command-Return to show the file in the Finder.
• Press Tab to open the file in an application other the standard one.

(Don’t worry if you think that it’s too hard to remember the Command-Return or Tab shortcuts. As you saw in Two Menus, earlier, you can click the name of the selected file in the bar to open the Action menu. The Action menu lists these commands, so you can choose them there. The menu also acts like a cheat sheet, so you can see a reminder of what the shortcuts are.)

Viewing Files as You Browse

You’ve seen above how to access recently opened files from an application, and how to browse your Mac’s file system. If you want to get a better look at these items without actually opening them, you can use Mac OS X’s Quick Look feature. Just select a filename and press the Space bar. Depending on the item, you’ll see either an image or a file’s contents. Quick Look can be helpful, for example, if you are browsing in a long list of items, but you can’t tell from the filename which one you want to open.

Accessing Recent LaunchBar Items

You’ve seen how to access recent files by application, but LaunchBar also remembers which files, folders, or other items you’ve accessed via the bar. You can view a “recent LaunchBar items” list to find an item you opened a few hours ago, but can’t remember what it’s called.

Invoke the bar, then press Command-B. LaunchBar shows a list of recently accessed items, in reverse chronological order (the most recent one at the top). Some can be browsed; just press the Space bar or the right-arrow key.

Browsing by Category

The LaunchBar index has the notion of a category, which is a collection of similar items. There are categories for Applications, Calendars, and Text Files, which are each for a certain type of file. But there are also categories for types of data stored in other ways, such as Contact Groups, Email Addresses, Playlists, and Web Bookmarks. To browse by category, type something like CAT to see Categories — Indexing Rule in your results. Press the Space bar or the right-arrow key to view the different categories (Figure 11).

More Examples of Browsing

Here are just a few more examples of the ways you can access application-related files and data by browsing:

• Preference panes: Open the different panes of System Preferences by typing SYS. Then press the Space bar or right-arrow key to view a list of the panes, arrow down to select one, and press Return. (Instead of arrowing, you can type a couple of letters to select a pane; see Sub-search, a page or so ahead. Of course, if you know the name of the preference pane you want, you can access it directly with an abbreviation search as well, which is easiest.)
• Bookmarks: You can quickly access bookmarks for your favorite Web browser(s). I explain how in Access Bookmarks & History.
• iTunes library: If you type, say, ITN, to bring up iTunes in the bar, then press the right-arrow key, you can access many items in your iTunes library. I’ll look at this more closely in Control iTunes.

  Tip: Pressing the Space bar when iTunes is selected in the bar opens a search field to search the iTunes Store.

• iPhoto library: LaunchBar indexes your iPhoto library. Type IPT, select iPhoto, then arrow right to access events or albums.
• Services: Mac OS X offers services, which are features of one application (such as Dictionary) that you can access from within another application (such as a word processor) or the Finder. You can abbreviation-search for the Services category, say, by typing SERV. Then browse in that category to check out your options. See Use Services to find out how LaunchBar makes services easier to work with.
• Indexing rules: LaunchBar uses rules to generate its index. You can browse the results of each indexing rule by typing, say, IND, selecting Indexing Rules, then pressing the Space bar or the right-arrow key (Figure 12). (I discuss indexing rules in Control the Index.)
  

  Figure 12: When you view LaunchBar’s indexing rules, you can browse them to access any items they contain.

Browse Text Files

If you browse through a list of files in LaunchBar, you may see some with a triangle icon, indicating that you can browse the text within the file. This is the case for certain types of files—plain text and RTF files, for example—as well as for text you’ve copied to the clipboard, which you view in your clipboard history.

If you select a file with a triangle icon and press the right-arrow key, you’ll see a number of results below the bar; these correspond to paragraphs or lines (depending on whether the file contains returns or line breaks). You can select any of these paragraphs or lines and copy them, create snippets from them (see Type Less with Snippets), or use Instant Send (which I discuss below).

Sub-search

With browsing, as you saw just above, you first abbreviation-search to find an item in your LaunchBar index. If you can browse within that item, a triangle icon appears on the bar and you can arrow right (or, usually, press the Space bar) to browse.

But, what if you arrow right and the results list is too long to work your way through effectively? That’s where LaunchBar’s third superpower, sub-search, comes in. Type a few letters that abbreviate the name of something in the list, and LaunchBar narrows the list to items that match the abbreviation. You can even train LaunchBar to understand your sub-search abbreviations. Anything that you can browse for, once you are browsing, you can sub-search for instead.

Here’s an example. My editor, Tonya, has a folder on her computer called Take Control Ebooks, that contains every Take Control ebook ever written. When she wants to open one, she first abbreviation-searches to access that folder. She then arrows right to browse in the folder. The name of the first file in the folder turns blue on the bar; the blue color indicates that she can sub-search, if she likes (Figure 13).

In this case, she wants to check a fact about the Scrivener word processor, so she presses SC to select the ebook about Scrivener (Figure 14). Now, she can press the Space bar to preview it in Quick Look or Return to open it. (And, now that it’s “in the bar,” she can do other things with it too, such as send it as an attachment in email to a customer who lost his copy—see Send To, just ahead.)

In contrast to the sub-search example of Tonya locating a file whose name contains the word Scrivener, if Tonya were to invoke the bar and immediately type SC, she would get the Scrivener application on the bar (Figure 15), because her copy of LaunchBar knows that when she searches her entire index with an abbreviation search, SC means the Scrivener app.

The best way to understand sub-search is to realize that your first abbreviation search returns a number of results; sub-searching performs a new abbreviation search within only those results, not the entire LaunchBar index.

Send To

Once you’ve found an item—when it’s on the bar—you can open it, as you’ve seen above, or you can send it to another application, or to an action or service. The key to Send To, LaunchBar’s fourth superpower, is the Tab key. While you can’t send things through walls, or at warp speed, what LaunchBar displays when you press Tab depends on the type of item. In Figure 16, I show LaunchBar acting on an RTF file after I’ve pressed Tab.

When you use Send To, LaunchBar shows an arrow ➝ icon after the filename in the bar, pointing to a preview of what pressing Return will perform at that time. In the case of the figure just above, the arrow points to Open with TextEdit. If I were to arrow down in the results list, it would point to Open with BBEdit and so on.

Once you master Send To, which involves selecting an item in LaunchBar and then pressing Tab, you might be wondering if there’s a way to do something similar with an item that you don’t first select in the bar, such as an icon in the Finder or a selection of text in an email message. The answer is, “Naturally!” Read on to learn how, with Instant Send.

Instant Send

With the Instant Send feature, LaunchBar’s fifth superpower, you select an item before you invoke LaunchBar, thus sending that item to LaunchBar when you invoke the bar. And, LaunchBar is then primed to let you do something with the item by sending it along to some “target” application, action, or service. A source “item” could be a file or folder in the Finder, or even a selection of text in a file.

Here’s an example: Say you have a file that you want to email to a friend. Select that file in the Finder, and then press your LaunchBar keyboard shortcut, but don’t release the keys right away. Hold them for a half-second or so until the bar appears.

The file icon, filename, and path show in the bar, with the orange icon at the right, as in Figure 17.

The orange icon indicates that you are in a state where you may, if you like, send the item on the bar to something else. In fact, the white icon within the orange circle means Tab, indicating that you are in much the same situation as if you had selected your item in LaunchBar and then pressed Tab—as described just earlier in Send To.

In this example, the target is a friend’s contact card. Type the first few letters of your friend’s name, or her initials, to bring up her card in the LaunchBar results. Select her card and press Return. LaunchBar creates a new email message to your friend, with the file attached.

Switching Applications

Although you can switch to an open application with an abbreviation search, at times you may want to switch to an application but be uncertain of a good abbreviation to associate with it. You probably know that you can switch applications in Mac OS X by pressing Command-Tab, then press Tab again to cycle through active apps. LaunchBar offers a similar application switching feature.

To use LaunchBar’s application switcher, follow these steps carefully:

1. Invoke the bar, but continue holding down the Command key—or whatever modifier key you have chosen for your LaunchBar keyboard shortcut—and with that modifier key down, press and release the Space bar. (In other words, if your LaunchBar shortcut is Command-Space, press Command-Space, Space.)

   A list of active applications appears in the results list.

2. Keep the modifier key down. Press and release the Space bar repeatedly to cycle through the list until you’ve selected the app you want. Alternatively, arrow up or down in the list, or navigate the menu with a mouse wheel or trackpad scrolling gesture.
3. With the app selected, release the modifier key.

Your Mac switches to the selected app.