Hi everyone!
I want to share how I ended up building my own app for organizing shortcuts and getting quick access to files in Windows — and why the existing alternatives didn't work for me.
By day, I'm a .NET developer with nearly 9 years of commercial experience, but that's not really the point here. I think most of us know the situation: you constantly need quick access to certain apps, games, or files. What follows is purely my own opinion, so feel free to disagree.
The options we typically have:
- Keep everything on the desktop — but it quickly turns into a mess, which bothers some people more than others.
- Try to organize the desktop into some kind of structure to reduce the chaos. Partially solves the visual noise problem.
- Use Windows Search. Doesn't feel like a time-saver to me — you still have to type something.
- Use apps that modify or overlay the desktop to organize things.
- Use apps that act as custom launchers with search (a replacement for Windows Search). In my opinion, these have the same issue as Windows Search itself.
I'm still on Windows 10, by the way — I'm aware of the negative reputation around Windows 11, so I may be missing some features there that address this.
Now, about option 4. I'm intentionally not naming any specific apps to avoid giving them unnecessary attention. For almost 20 years I used the same freeware program that gave me pretty much what I needed. The catch: it hasn't been updated since 2011, felt very outdated, and I wanted a bit more. When I started looking for modern alternatives, I couldn't find anything that matched what I was after. Most solutions offer customizable zones directly on the desktop where you organize your shortcuts — but to me, they just replace one kind of visual noise with another. The desktop is still cluttered, just differently.
So I decided to build it myself — something that would work for me, my family, and colleagues who had the same need.
My requirements were:
- A single window for quick access to everything I need
- Flexible structure — separate spaces for different areas of daily computer use, with organization within each space
- Always-on-top or on-demand (tray icon or hotkey)
- From that last point came the idea of an animated panel that slides out of view to the screen edge when not needed
- Lightweight and stable — we don't need buggy software, especially with today's RAM constraints
- Layout customization: icon size, items per row, spacing, font sizes for different parts of the UI
- Deep visual customization: color themes, background image with visual effects, per-group color overrides
That's how Shortcutty was born. It's not perfect and there's still work to do — but it meets all my requirements.
As for distribution: I value my time, and with a full-time job and parenthood there's not much of it. I went with Steam as the most straightforward path for someone without prior experience in this area. What comes of this experiment — time will tell.
The reason I'm posting: yes, I want to get the word out. But more importantly, I genuinely want feedback from real users to improve the app. So I'm offering the first 30 people who comment a free Steam key — in exchange for honest impressions and constructive criticism.