YOU’LL NEED THIS

FLOW LAUNCHER

Download the app from www.flowlauncher.com.

THE WINDOWS SEARCH TOOL—accessible from the Taskbar—is OK as it goes, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. A popular replacement is the app launcher—a floating search bar triggered by a keyboard shortcut—that offers combined file searches and easy access to any app on your system. They’re a dime a dozen, but one of the most impressive is Flow Launcher, and not simply because it checks the boxes of being both open source and completely free.

Flow Launcher—or Flow to its devotees—provides you with the means to search (and open) apps, system settings, files, and the web from a single location, accessible from anywhere on your system via your choice of hotkey. But thanks to its modular construction, that barely scratches the surface of what you can configure it to do. We’ll show you how to get it set up, perform searches, and fine-tune those searches to better suit the way you work. We’ll also reveal how to expand its capabilities further via a library of over 180 plugins, giving you access to a wide range of search tools and add-ons that expand Flow’s capabilities further.

–NICK PEERS

1 GET SET UP

Head to www.flowlauncher.comand click ‘Download’, where you’ll find links to both installer and portable builds, as well as command-line package managers Winget, Scoop, and Choco. In most cases, you’ll want the installer, so click this to save ‘Flow-Launcher-Setup.exe’ to your ‘Downloads’ folder, then double-click it and follow the prompts. If the SmartScreen filter pops up, click ‘More Info’ followed by ‘Run Anyway’.

» Work your way through the setup wizard, which introduces the basic concepts, such as the Alt-Space keyboard shortcut that brings up Flow’s floating launcher. If this shortcut is already registered to another app (such as PowerToys Run), you should be alerted via a pop-up.

» If this is the case, click on the ‘Alt Space’ combo [Image A] to bring up a dialog inviting you to enter a different shortcut trigger, such as Ctrl-Alt-Space. Click ‘Save’ when done. The rest of the wizard reveals further hotkeys you can use in place of the mouse, plus introduces the concept of keywords and commands, which are entered into Flow’s launcher. The final step enables you to configure Flow to start with Windows and change its default behavior when you first launch it (minimized). Click ‘Done’ to finish.

2 FIND FILES AND APPS QUICKLY

Let’s open by exploring Flow’s file and app search tool. Press Alt-Space or your chosen key combo to bring its floating pop-up into view. You’ll see it appears on top of any other window, so simply click anywhere else on screen to hide it again, or click and drag on it to reposition it on the screen—for example, in a corner, so it’s less intrusive. Note it reverts to its default position the next time you open it—see the box (pg. 62) for details on changing this (and other) aspects of its default behavior.