A quick file search and app launcher for Windows with community-made plugins.

Dedicated to making your work flow more seamless. Search everything from applications, files, bookmarks, YouTube, Twitter and more. Flow will continue to evolve, designed to be open and built with the community at heart.

_{Remember to star it, flow will love you more :)}

Getting Started • Features • Plugins • Hotkeys • Sponsors • Questions/Suggestions • Development • Docs

🚗 Getting Started

Installation

Windows 7+ Installer or Portable Version

Winget

winget install "Flow Launcher"

Scoop

scoop install Flow-Launcher

Chocolatey

choco install Flow-Launcher

When installing for the first time Windows may raise an issue about security due to code not being signed, if you downloaded from this repo then you are good to continue the set up.

Or download the early access version.

🎁 Features

Applications & Files

• Search for apps, files or file contents.
• Supports Everything and Windows Index.

• Support search using environment variable paths.

Web Searches & URLs

Browser Bookmarks

System Commands

• Provides system related commands. shutdown, lock, settings, etc.
• System command list

Calculator

• Do mathematical calculations and copy the result to clipboard.

Shell Command

• Run batch and PowerShell commands as Administrator or a different user.
• Ctrl+Shift+Enter to Run as Administrator.

Explorer

• Save file or folder locations for quick access.

Drag & Drop

• Drag a file/folder to File Explorer, or even Discord.
• Copy/move behavior can be change via Ctrl or Shift, and the operation is displayed on the mouse cursor.

Windows & Control Panel Settings

• Search for Windows & Control Panel settings.

Priority

• Prioritise the order of each plugin's results.

Preview Panel

• Use F1 to toggle the preview panel.
• Media files will be displayed as large images, otherwise a large icon and full path will be displayed.
• Turn on preview permanently via Settings (Always Preview).
• Use Ctrl++/- and Ctrl+[/] to adjust search window width and height quickly if the preview area is too narrow.

Customizations

• Window size adjustment, animation, and sound
• Color Scheme (aka Dark Mode)

• There are various themes and you also can make your own.

Date & Time Display In Search Window

• Display date and time in search window.

💬 Languages

• Supports languages from Chinese to Italian and more.
• Supports Pinyin (拼音) search.
• Crowdin support for language translations.

Portable

• Fully portable.
• Type flow user data to open your saved user settings folder. They are located at:
  • If using roaming: %APPDATA%\FlowLauncher
  • If using portable, by default: %localappdata%\FlowLauncher\app-<VersionOfYourFlowLauncher>\UserData
  • Type open log location to open your logs folder, they are saved along with your user settings folder.

🎮 Game Mode

• Pause hotkey activation when you are playing games.
• When in search window use Ctrl+F12 to toggle on/off.
• Type Toggle Game Mode

📦 Plugins

• Support wide range of plugins. Visit here for our plugin portfolio.
• Publish your own plugin to flow! Create plugins in:

SpotifyPremium

Steam Search

Clipboard History

Home Assistant Commander

Colors

GitHub

Window Walker

......and more!

🛒 Plugin Store

• You can view the full plugin list or quickly install a plugin via the Plugin Store menu inside Settings

• or type pm install/uninstall/update + the plugin name in the search window,

⌨️ Hotkeys

System Command List

💁‍♂️ Tips

• More tips

Sponsors

Mentions

• Why I Chose to Support Flow-Launcher - Appwrite
• Softpedia Editor's Pick

❔ Questions/Suggestions

Yes please, let us know in the Q&A section. Join our community on Discord!

Development

New changes

All changes to flow are captured via pull requests. Some new changes will have been merged but still pending release, this means whilst a change may not exist in the current release, it may very well have been accepted and merged into the dev branch and available as a pre-release download. It is therefore a good idea that before you start to make changes, search through the open and closed pull requests to make sure the change you intend to make is not already done.

Each of the pull requests will be marked with a milestone indicating the planned release version for the change.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome, in addition to the main project(C#) there are also documentation(md), website(html/css) and others that can be contributed to. If you are unsure of a change you want to make, let us know in the Discussions, otherwise feel free to put in a pull request.

You will find the main goals of flow placed under the Projects board, so feel free to contribute on that. If you would like to make small incremental changes, feel free to do so as well.

Get in touch if you like to join the Flow-Launcher Team and help build this great tool.

Developing/Debugging

• Flow Launcher's target framework is .Net 7

• Install Visual Studio 2022

• Install .Net 7 SDK

  • via Visual Studio installer
  • via winget winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.7
  • Manually from here