Launch applications by name using Applescript

Jan 21, '04 10:59:00AM

Contributed by: magir

Quite often I use the Terminal to launch an application using open -a application_name. This is faster than traversing any menus or folders. An even faster way would be to put that functionality on a hotkey, so I wrote a small script which I launch using Dragthing (although there are several other alternatives).

The script shows a dialog and you can simply enter the Name of the application which has to be launched:

tell me
  activate
  set s to display dialog "Which appliation do you want to start?" default answer "Safari"
  do shell script "open -a \"" & text returned of s & "\""
end tell
Copy and paste into the AppleScript Script Editor, save it as an application, and then use DragThing (or similar) to assign it a hotkey.

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