Applications on demand with Apwal program launcher
READY FOR ACCESS
Launching a program by clicking
with your mouse can have a few
disadvantages. Users lose their
way in nested menu structures,
and desktop icons can become
hidden behind windows. The
Apwal program launcher makes it
easy to launch with a click.
Modern desktops and window
managers typically give you all
the options you need to launch
your favorite programs by clicking with
your mouse. This saves time, as clicking
takes just a couple of seconds, in contrast
to entering commands at the command
line. But this still wasn’t fast
enough for Pascal Eberhard. Moving
active windows to look for icons wasn’t
his idea of efficiency. This prompted Pascal
to develop Apwal [1], an icon-based
program launcher that pops up a userdefined
selection of icons under the
mouse cursor when called on.
The program name is an acronym for advanced
and powerful window app
launcher.
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