Guillotine Documentation
Overview:
Guillotine is a FREE and lightweight Windows utility that allows you to
quickly and naturally access items you commonly (and uncommonly) use
like programs, bookmarks, contacts, and web searches. The idea is to
find things quickly just by typing a few keys, selecting your item, and
going on your merry way. It's much more intuitive than hunting down
those items as you normally would. It may take a while to break your
old habits, but once you do, you'll see how much more intuitive it is
to your normal workflow.
Why use Guillotine over other program launchers and file finders?
- Speed! It's all about workflow. When you work on your
computer a
lot, after a while you realize how slow it is to use your mouse,
especially when you have to keep switching between keyboard and mouse.
Wouldn't it be easier if you could just call up those items without
your hand leaving the keyboard, just by typing in a few characters.
- Direct access. Instead of breaking your workflow and/or
train of
thought, trying to remember where you organized something, just search
for it by it's name, or part of it's name, or part of it's contents.
Navigating and hunting for items is slow and unnecessary. Let the
computer do the work for you!
- Presentation. While the GUI may not be pretty (yet), the
way
information is presented to you is much more intuitive than presenting
results in a web browser (as Google Desktop Search does). In
Guillotine, the results are presented to you in a list, which you can
navigate using your keyboard. You can also continue to type and hone in
your search, in real time, something a web browser can't do.
- It's extensible. Guillotine is designed with extensibility
in
mind. That is, it's architecture is open to users to expand on it's
functionality, to suit their own needs. Guillotine's plugin framework
allows you to do just that. If you want to add some new functionality,
do so. If you want to change Guillotine's behavior, do so. Or, use a
plugin that somebody else may have already written.
Usage:
This is the main window. You call it up by hitting Ctrl-Space (or Alt-Space if Ctrl-Space is already used on your system). You
can hide it by hitting the Esc key. In the middle of the window is the
Search Box. This is where you will be entering your searches. On the
left is the Action Box, which provides feedback by displaying the icon
of a current Action you may be running (more on Actions later). On the
right is the System Menu. Click on it to bring up the menu that allows
you to access preferences and quit the program.
To search, just type in a 3-4 letters. After a short pause, Guillotine
will start searching your files/bookmarks/contacts/etc. for those
letters. If you made a mistake, you can cancel the search by pressing
Esc. You can modify and restart the search by hitting Backspace or by
typing in another letter.
So, lets say you type in "goo" into the Search Box. After a short pause
in your typing, you will see your results list populated like this.
Obviously, you'll have different results, but they should pull up fast.
Now you can use your arrow keys to navigate Up and Down to the item you
want to go to. Now hit Enter. If you select a URL, that URL will be
opened in your default browser. If you select on Outlook Contact, a new
mail item will be created to that contact (or you can choose to have
Guillotine just open the Outlook Contact). If you chose a shortcut to a
program, the program will be launced, and so forth. Later, you will be
able to choose from multiple actions for each result.
Guillotine comes pre-configured with a whole slew of web searches you
can perform. Besides the standard items like Google, Yahoo, and MSN,
you can also search sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist,
etc. You can easily add your own in the preferences page (more on this
later). In this example, I had typed "google" and hit the space key.
That put Guillotine into "Action Mode"... the action being "Do a Google
search on the text I'm about to type in", which in this instance, is
"guill". When you hit Enter, the Google search results for "guill" will
be returned in your default browser. Easy! I could have also typed in
"google" and hit Enter to go into Action Mode. But, that is still too
much typing. Guillotine comes pre-configured with shortcuts to almost
all of the default searches. The shortcut for a Google Search is "g".
So, I could just as easily have typed in "g" and space or "g" and
Enter to enter action mode. Of course, you can change the shortcut to do a Google search to
whatever you want in the Shortcuts Preferences page.
In addition to searching your computer for items, you can also navigate
your file system just like Windows Explorer. Simply type in "c:\" (or
whatever drive you want to navigate) and start navigating the file
system using the arrow keys. Use the Right and Left arrow keys to
navigate up and down folders. Hit Enter to launch a file or folder.
Preferences:
Here is the Preferences window. You'll find several categories of
preferences you can set. The first one is for setting "General"
preferences. There are options to automatically start Guilllotine with
Windows (i.e. when you login) and add a Guillotine icon to the Quick
Launch toolbar (which you won't be needing anymore, right!). There are
also options to show 1 or 2 lines of text for each item in the results
one, as well as change the font size and color of text in the
result list. Lastly, you can change the Hot Key combination used to
call up Guilllotine. You might want to use the Windows key + Space, if
you haven't destroyed your Windows key yet :-)
Here are searching related preferences. Most imporantly, you can
specify whether Guilltine pre-indexes your bookmarks, files, etc. when
it launches, or whether they will be searched "live" every time you
perform a search. Note that searching "Offline" is MUCH faster than
searching in "Real Time". This is because all of the items are indexed
once, when Guillotine launches (which can be a lengthy operation). Then
when you go to perform a search, Guillotine performs a QUICK search on
the items it previously indexed. The downside to this is that you run
the risk of Guillotine getting out of sync with the items on your
computer. However, you can tell Guillotine to "Update Cache" using the
System Menu on the Main Window, which will refresh it's index of items.
Also of note is minimum number of characters for Guillotine to start
searching for, and the Re-Search delay. This specifies the amount of
time Guillotine will wait before it starts searching.
As state previously, you can set shortcuts to Actions (e.g. Google
Searches, etc.). In this window, click on an item in the list, then
click in the Shortcut: text box. Type in the letters you want to assign
to that Action, then hit the Assign button. Pretty simple.
Here you can see all of the plugins that Guillotine has loaded. The
plugins do all the work of searching and executing actions. Don't want
Internet Explorer to be searched? No problem. Double-click on the IE
item and uncheck both "Search IE Favorites" and "Search IE History".
Some of the more configurable plugins are the Filesystem plugin and the
WebSearches plugin:
In the Filesystem Plugin, you can specify which folders you want
Guilllotine to search through. Feel free to add and remove folders from
the list. You can use full qualified paths (like
C:\Path\To\Some\Folder) or relative paths, which are paths relative to
where you installed Guillotine (e.g. ..\..\). Guillotine comes
pre-configured with 7 "pseudo environment variables". They are
(%START_MENU%, %START_MENU_ALL%, %MY_DOCUMENTS%, %DESKTOP%,
%DESKTOP_ALL%, %RECENT%, and %QUICK_LAUNCH%). They expand to their
matching paths on your system (e.g. %START_MENU% would expand to
C:\Program Files\YourUserName\Start Menu\). This is so you can put
Guillotine on a Flash Drive and have it run from any computer you plug
it in to. You can also specify Filters so that only files matching
those Filters will get searched. Exclude Filters will filter out matching files. If you want to search for all
files in a folder, just remove all of the items in the Filters lists.
In the Web Searches Plugin, you can specify which sites you want to
perform your searches on. Specify the name of the search (cosmetic),
the Keyword (which in the Google example earlier was "google"), the
Base URL, which your search term will get appended to, and the URL
Suffix which gets appended to your search term (needed for some sites).
You can also set the icon that will show up in the list. If you want to
add an icon to that list, copy the icon into the
plugins/websearches/images directory. Make sure it's in .ico file. You
may have to re-launch Guillotine for it to show up in the list.
Conclusion:
That should be enough to get you up and running. If you have any
questions, you can visit the support forums,
or contact me here.
Happy searching.