I've tried many an app launcher in the past few months, whether that's on Windows or macOS. While I definitely have my favorites already, I keep seeing new options here and there, and when I wrote about the tools that change how you use Windows, one of our readers mentioned Listary, so I had to give it a shot.

Listary is a pretty interesting combination of a launcher and a file search tool, with some extra perks to speed up your workflow that much more. If you're looking for a lightweight way to quickly launch your apps and boost your productivity, this is a pretty solid option, even if it lacks some of the features of its competitors.

Launch apps quickly

And customize actions, too

Listary is essentially split into two main components: the launcher, and the file search tool (though the launcher also searches your files). The launcher is fairly basic, but it's still a step up from using Windows Search to open your apps. Press Ctrl twice and you have a search bat on your screen, and you can use it to search for any app or file you want. Press Enter, and you'll launch it. It's very straightforward, but it actually saves you a ton of time once you get used to it. Using the Start menu feels clunky compared to a launcher like this. One big benefit is you can also create custom commands for specific tasks or programs, so it's even quicker to launch them.

What's really cool, though, is that if you want to open a file, you actually have a few options available to you. You can press the right arrow over a result (or right-click it) and it will show you various actions available, similar to the File Explorer context menu. But where it gets extra interesting is the ability to create custom actions you can add to this menu.

Say you want to open JPG files directly in Photoshop. You can add that action in the Listary section and even associate a specific hotkey with it, so you can easily open any JPG file by pressing that hotkey. This can speed up all kinds of workflows that might not otherwise appear in File Explorer. Sure, you can add items to a context menu, too, but it's a much more convoluted process.

Fast file search

With lots of filtering options

The other half of Listary is the file search capability, and it's also pretty great. Once again, Windows Search is not a fantastic tool, as it's pretty slow to index results and it can take some time to even display them. Listary is an alternative that is far more promising, and I'd say it even has some advantages over Everything, another popular search engine for Windows.

Listary's file search finds files across your entire PC, and it surfaces results incredibly quickly. Of course, you can customize the index to include or exclude specific locations, and you can also change the priority of certain folders in search results if you want to make certain content more visible in your searches.

You also get filtering options for content types and when files were modified to narrow down your search results. Plus, you can choose to search within specific folders by appending a backslash at the end of the folder name, so it makes it easy to perform very specific searches. This is all without getting into the Pro features, since I only used the free version of the app. Listary's website mentions more advanced file searching for Pro users, which may be worth a look.

Integration is the secret ingredient

Jump to any folder instantly

There's one more thing here that really makes Listary a more compelling tool, and that's a feature called Quick Switch. This is a part of Listary that acts more like an add-on for other apps, and it makes it easy to immediately jump to a folder without wasting time. Quick Switch integrates with File Explorer so at any point, you can just start typing and it will use Listary to search for the folder you're looking for, and you can instantly jump to it. You can also open a dedicated Listary menu for other quick actions.

But it gets even better: Listary also supports integration with a range of third-party apps, including file managers such as FreeCommander and OneCommander. Perhaps even better is that it even supports an app like WinRAR, so when you're extracting a file, you can immediately jump to the folder where you want to store the extracted contents. That also applies to tools like Bandizip, or even things like the File picker dialog that opens when you try to upload a file in your browser. It's so much faster to get to the files you need this way, especially when the UI offered by a given app is very limiting.

There are no plug-ins or extensions

Still a ways from replacing Flow Launcher

The downfall of Listary for me ends up being the fact that a tool like Flow Launcher, which is my go-to on Windows, can do so much more thanks to extensions. Listary has a great set of built-in features, and some cool customization options, but there isn't a proper extensibility platform for it. All it can do aside from what i've already mentioned is perform web searches, though you can add custom search engines to it.

With Flow Launcher, I can do something as specific as searching for a YouTube video and downloading it. I can look up information about a Pokémon while I'm playing a game and be directed to multiple resources specific to games in that series. There's so much to an app like Flow Launcher that really makes it special, and I can't imagine replacing it with Listary because it does so much less. Though I would probably keep Listary on my PC just for the Quick Switch feature, so maybe a lightweight version of the app that does just that could be a good idea.

Listary deserves your attention

All things considered, I'd say Listary is a very compelling app if you want a lightweight solution that helps speed up your workflow and you don't need all the bells and whistles of something like Flow Launcher. It makes it easier to launch apps and find your files, and the Quick Switch bar is a legitimately amazing feature that saves a ton of time in tedious tasks like uploading files.

It might not be the ultimate all-in-one solution, but you can probably pair it with something like Flow Launcher if you're willing to have both apps installed.