How To Launch Apps Now That Launchpad Is Gone

Hi, this is Gary with Macmost.com. Now that with macOs Tahoe Launchpad is gone, let's take a look at some alternatives. 

Launchpad was a utility built into macOS that helped you find and launch apps. It wasn't the only way to launch apps. In fact most people used other ways to do it. But When Apple got rid of Launchpad a lot of users were confused as to why they would get rid of it. But before a lot of users complained they didn't like it and didn't use it. Apple has been here before. There were so many calls to breakup the iTunes App into multiple apps and then when Apple did that there were people that didn't like the fact that iTunes was broken up. In software development you simply can't please everyone. But if you did use Launchpad and now it is not there anymore here are some alternatives. 

Of course the most obvious alternative and the easiest way to launch apps by far is simply to use the Dock. The Dock is made for holding app icons and making it easy for you to launch them. You can, of course, customize what's here. All you need to do is bring up a Finder Window and go to Applications. This is where all your Applications should be. Then if there is an app that you want to have in the Dock you find it here and simply drag it into the Dock in any slot you want. Then you can also drag these apps around. Reordering them like you want. You can group them together. You can put them in some order, like the one you use the most to the left. That kind of thing. If there is an app you don't use that often you can get rid of it by dragging it up to the top and removing it. So you should be able to put your ten or fifteen most used apps here for easy launching. 

By the way if the main reason you don't use the Dock is because you like to use the keyboard, not the mouse or trackpad to launch apps, well you can still use the keyboard with the Dock. The fn or Globe Key and A brings up the Dock and then you can use the arrow keys to move around or type a letter and it will jump to the first app with that letter there and then Return will launch that app. That should cover you for most of what you need. 

But for what is not there you can just use Spotlight to launch. In fact many users don't use the Dock but instead use Spotlight to launch things even if those apps are actually here in the Dock. So, previously, and still now in Tahoe you can use Command Space to bring up Spotlight. Just type the first few letters of the app you want to launch so you can see it there at the top and then press Return. That launches the app. For many users this is the way they launch apps and for other users they'll launch their primary apps here in the Dock and anything that's not here in the Dock that they need to use they'll use Spotlight to launch it. 

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But now Spotlight has a new section dedicated just to apps. So you can bring up Spotlight with this button here in the Menu Bar or just Command Space. Then when you start moving the pointer you'll see these different modes here to the right. The first one is Applications and you can see the keyboard shortcut is indicated as Command 1. So you can click here or you can just bring up Spotlight and then do Command 1 to get to Applications. You can also Command Space 1 without ever lifting your hand off of the Command Key. Then you're in a mode of Spotlight that's only going to look for Applications. So it is going to be a lot faster. Kind of like how Launchpad gave us an advantage over Spotlight before because Launchpad only concerned itself about apps. This new mode of Spotlight also only concerns itself about apps. So it will be faster to use this than just regular Spotlight to find apps. Just like with Launchpad before you can start typing the first few letters of an app, see when it is selected, and then press Return. 

But in addition to that you also have Categories here at the top. So you can type one of those category names and press Return or you can simply click on it and then it will narrow things down by that category. You also get suggestions at the top. So your Mac is going to try to figure out what your most likely to launch right now and these are going to be the things here at the top. Unlike Launchpad all the results here, below the line, are in alphabetical order. Actually over the years the question I got asked the most about Launchpad was simply how do you alphabetize all of the icons there. Here you've got in Spotlight this Applications Mode that has everything alphabetized. So hopefully a lot of people are really happy about that. 

Now in addition to this Grid View you can also click here and switch to List View, if you prefer. If you're worried about the fact that it takes an extra key press to get here than it did for Launchpad, well guess what? You can customize this and give it a keyboard shortcut. So we're going to go in System Settings to Keyboard and then to Keyboard Shortcuts. Go to Spotlight and then here you'll see Show Apps. Turn this On and assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Use the same keyboard shortcut that you have been using all along for Launchpad if you like. I assigned Shift Command Space to it and I can now bring it up, Shift Command Space, type, Return just like I did previously with Launchpad. 

So those are some of the built-in ways to launch apps that are available without you having to set anything up in advance. But if you want even more ways to launch apps, well there are three techniques you should know about. The one is, of course, is you can just go to the Applications Folder and this is where the apps actually live. You can just double click on one here to launch that app. But in addition to that you can add this Applications Folder to the  Dock. So I'm going to Command click on a title here and go up one level. So now I can see the Applications Folder. I'm going to drag it over to the Dock here on the right side. It has to be on the right side of the Dock near the trashcan, to the right of the last line there. I've added applications to it. Now I'm going to Control click on it and change it to Display as Folder and Control click again and say View Content as List. So now when I want to launch an app I can use this and it brings up this list here, in alphabetical order of the contents of the Applications Folder. I can even use the keyboard to jump to a spot in the list, like C for Calculator. You can even type more letters to get to a specific app. Then Return will launch. The big advantage to this is that it even looks inside folders. So there is the Utilities Folder and you can get inside that as well. That's really easy to add. A lot of people had that previously. It's just a quick way to see all their apps and get to anyone they want from the Dock. 

But let's look at another method. Let's go back down to that Applications Folder. But I'm going to click here on the Desktop. So the Desktop is what is selected. I'm going to do File and then New Folder. I'm going to create a new folder in the Desktop and call that Launchpad. So in this Folder I'm going to put aliases, shortcuts, to the apps from the Applications Folder. When you drag and drop from the Applications Folder to some other location it automatically creates an alias. Notice how when I drag this app here you can see the little curved arrow for the pointer there. So you don't have to hold modifier keys down to create an alias. It does it automatically with apps from the Applications Folder. So now in Launchpad here I've got that one app. I can add more if I want. I can even add a whole bunch by selecting and then just Shift Click to select a whole list of them. Drag them all in and drop them in here. Now if I look in this Launchpad Folder and I have it set to Icon View here, it starts to look at lot like Launchpad did. In fact if I go to View and then Sort By I can set it to Name and it's automatically going to sort everything by Name and put it in a Grid, like this. So I can remove something. Like let's say I don't need the Chess App in here. I can take that and get rid of that alias there and it will fill in the space. It's going to keep it sorted by Name. Or, if I wanted to I can go to View and just say Snap to Grid and now I can actually arrange things like I want. It's not as easy as it was in Launchpad because things won't move out of the way. But you do have complete control to arrange these in groups, leave blank space, do all sorts of things to organize how this looks. 

Let's go back to Sort By Name just to make it easy and you can even go to View and then Show View Options and then do things like, for instance, set the icon size to something bigger. Do Grid spacing. All sorts of things that you couldn't do with Launchpad you can do here. You can even make the text size larger like that if you want. Or position the text on the right of each icon. If you really want to get fancy go down here to Background. As long as you're in Icon View you can set a color for the background. So I can choose, like, a color like that and have a fancy color. Or I can choose a picture, like this, and I'll actually choose a picture that I created with Image Playground and stored in my Pictures folder here, like that. So you can create a nice little background here. Again something you couldn't do with Launchpad. 

Now you can organize that to your heart's content and whenever you want to launch an app just double click on the Launchpad folder here and then find the app you want, double click on it to launch. If you don't like the fact that the folder sticks around a trick is to hold the Option Key down and double click. It actually closes the folder after it takes an Action like double clicking to launch the app. 

Another thing you can do with this is go to View and Enter Full Screen. Then that will be its own Desktop here. So in Mission Control you can see I've got that, like that, and if I double click on the icon here on the Desktop it will jump right to that already open window, which is another space there, Mission Control. So there's a ton of stuff, a ton of control you have you never had with Launchpad for building and organizing a custom folder filled with aliases to apps. Include only the ones you want, organize them as you like, even create folders like this and then move apps into those folders like that. There's so much you can do here if you really want to. 

If you want you can customize this icon here as well. Just Control Click it and choose Customize Folder. You can choose a color for it. But you can also then add one of these icons or an emoji to it. You can combine some of these ideas. I'm going to go to my Home folder here and I'm going to move Launchpad off of the Desktop into my Home Folder. So it's kind of out of the way and I don't see it normally. But I'm going to then drag and drop it to the right side of the Dock. This time I'm going to set it not only to Display Folder but this time View Content as a Grid. So now when I click on this Launchpad folder in the Dock I get a Grid like this. It still works with keys. Like I can still type CA and then there's Calculator and then press Return. But I have more control over  things. Like here's that folder I created and I can dive down into that folder and go back and it automatically will close that when you launch an app. 

So as you can see there are a ton of ways to launch apps and if you were used to using Launchpad before you can easily adapt to one of the other ways or build your own custom solution with a folder of aliases or the Dock. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.