I came across “Enso Launcher” and had to try it out. Enso Launcher is an application launcher similar to Quicksilver, Launchbar or Find And Run Robot. You press some key, type in some characters and the launcher shows you a list of applications that contain those characters so you can choose it and launch it.

Enso Launcher extends on that basic concept in a way similar to Quicksilver, but IMHO much better. In Enso you type commands that can be executed on different kinds of items. If you want to launch an application you type “go fire” for example and will get a list containing Firefox. You can even select some file in Explorer and type “open with Paint Shop” in Enso to get it opened in Paint Shop Pro. You can change the active window by typing in “go” and then select one of the windows in the appearing task list.

So is it currently the coolest thing on earth? Unfortunately not! The interface is sleek, the ideas brilliant, but it’s totally unusable. To bring Enso Launcher up, you have to press CAPS LOCK and hold it down while you are typing your commands. Then you release CAPS LOCK and the commands get executed. For someone normally typing with all ten fingers that’s just horrible. It makes your small finger hurt very fast and you aren’t able to type anything that contains an ‘a’, ‘y’ or ‘q’ in it. There is one alternative to bring Enso Launcher up. Press CAPS LOCK, press ALT, release CAPS LOCK and then release ALT. Then after typing in your command, you have to type CAPS LOCK again. ENTER, the intuitive choice won’t do.

So after ten minutes I uninstalled it and am staying with Find And Run Robot. It’s interface is not as sleek, the DonationCoder website is horrible – more so since the invention of Cody than ever – and the name of the application is also somehow unimaginative, but it works.

I’d like to see some of the ideas from Enso introduced into FARR, though.