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A new version of Runny works in Windows 7 and has some new nifty features.

I cleaned up command creation so there’s no need to prepend scripts and macros with a protocol-like keyword. Now to create a macro you can simply type:

new macro [macroname] [commands]

The same goes for script. Making “macro” and “script” sub-commands of new seemed like the most natural way to think of it.

I also added cascading parameters so a command can fall back on multiple forms of input when one doesn’t exist. For example:

new g http://www.google.com/search?q={$0|clip|prompt}

This will first look for a additional parameters after typing “g” and if none are found will check the clipboard for text data before straight out prompting for a search term. Using the pipe “|” you can string together these keywords in any order.

Lastly I added a special cliptext command ” {SLEEP n}” to pause the sending of keys for a set amount of milliseconds.

On the list so far for 0.4 is multi-tweeting, regular expression search & replacing, simple reminders & timers and extra help/command reference screens.

How cool would it be to call multiple custom runny commands with just one command? Cool enough to warrant an update to Runny that’s for sure!

Runny 0.2 adds a new custom command type “macro” that lets you string together multiple runny commands with or without parameters into one single command. Why you could even string together macros! And then string those to macros and on and on ad infinitum!

Check out the new download at the labs site… http://pivotlabs.com/opensource/runny

Runny is a project of mine which is similar to the quick launch command programs such as Launchy and Gnome Do but uses the built in capabilities of windows instead of running background processes.

For about six years now I’ve used a kind of poor-man’s unix by running commands straight from my Window’s Run box. I would make shortcuts to commonly used programs rename them to something small and simple and put them into a directory that’s referenced in my environment PATH. It worked really well and I never really thought much about it.

It wasn’t until Launchy and Gnome Do (both are amazing) and others started getting big that I thought this might be a “thing”. So I cleaned up my scripts, added supporting functions for clipboard management, twitter posting and text clips and packaged them into an easy installer.

It’s definitely limited but gives complete control over what the commands are and what they do and can even be run side-by-side with other launchers.

Check it out at my labs site!