Find files and apps quickly

THE WINDOWS SEARCH TOOL—accessible from the Taskbar—is OK as it goes, but there’s plenty of room for improvement.

- NICK PEERS

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.

1 GET SET UP

Head to www.flowlauncher.​com and 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.