Getting To The File You Want

By | September 20, 2004

Been playing with an interesting variation on the ActiveWords/SureType theme whereby you type what you’re looking for, not go trawling through submenus and whatnot. It’s called 1st TurboRun from Green Parrotts Software, and it allows you to just type the first few letters of whatever file or program you’re looking for, and will offer matches as you type. No remembering file names, locations or whatever. Neat.

It doesn’t seem to suck up too much memory and runs pretty smoothly, except when you assign it too many folders to look through, then things slow to a crawl. Another downside is that you can’t specify what kind of files 1st TurboRun should remember — not much point in storing lots of small txt files, for example, but every Word file it comes across it should make a note of.

1st TurboRun doesn’t have any of the extensibility of ActiveWords, and none of the text-storing functionality of SureType and other text storers. And if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t remember what they name files you’re probably better off with the excellent TaskTracker, which remembers what files you’ve been working with and stores them by file type and date in lists you can access easily.

But 1st TurboRun is neat because it works not just with files but with programs, meaning you can launch any program stored on your hard-drive with a couple of key strokes. It’s also is useful for those times when you kind of know what you called the file but aren’t quite sure. 1st TurboRun costs (I think; the website says the offer’s only good to June 31) $20.

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