LaunchBar overview

LaunchBar is an award-winning productivity utility that offers an amazingly intuitive and efficient way to search and access any kind of information stored on your computer or on the Web. It provides instant access to your applications, documents, contacts, and bookmarks, to your music library, to search engines and more, just by entering short abbreviations of the searched item's name.

You just hit Command-Space to bring LaunchBar's input window to front, enter an arbitrary abbreviation, and as soon as you start typing LaunchBar displays the best matching choices, ready to be opened immediately.

Start applications, open documents, invoke system services, compose emails, or navigate the Web-LaunchBar will be your essential servant.

What's new in version 6.24

New Features and Improvements

Browsing Emoji items with the Right-Arrow key now offers a “Look Up in Wikipedia” action.
The LaunchBar menu is now more conveniently accessible for VoiceOver users via VO-Shift-M.

Bug Fixes

The location and size of the LaunchBar window wasn’t preserved across restart of the app.
Improved “Empty Trash” action to bring the “LaunchBar wants access to control Finder” dialog if necessary to request the required Automation permission. Without this permission the action previously silently failed.
Search templates unnecessarily percent-encoded colons of the entered search text.
Fixed incorrect display of “3rd party app integration” warning when 1Password 8 is installed.
Fixed a couple of layout issues in the index window.

4.5

(363 Reviews of LaunchBar)

Comments
User Ratings

Buegelfrei

Jan 15, 2026

6.22.2

5.0

Version: 6.22.2

Holy cow! I just realized that the last time I paid for a LaunchBar upgrade was in 2014, when version 6 first launched! Amazingly, with all the regular updates, LaunchBar 6 still feels up-to-date. It's is the first app I install on any new Mac. In addition to the obvious (efficiently navigating my Mac from the keyboard), I make constant use of custom search templates, snippets (which fills in for some of the tricks I used to do with TextExpander that macOS text replacements doesn't cover), and clipboard merge, and its calculator is often more handy than opening another app. My only quibble is that after all these years, Obdev still hasn't produced a comprehensive user guide for 6, like they had for 5. I'm sure there are plenty of other features to discover.

Michael-Vilain

Oct 15, 2025

6.22.1

0.0

Version: 6.22.1

I still don't see the value of this tool compared to Alfred.

dwp-1

Jun 5, 2025

6.20.2

Version: 6.20.2

Love LaunchBar, been a user for many years. I have tried Alfred but always come back to LaunchBar for its ability to let me do most anything from the keyboard, quickly!