TheAction For Mac

TheAction is an application launcher designed to help you find and launch applications, System Preferences files, or other searchable items.

TheAction app greatly resembles the OS X Spotlight tool and features a couple of hotkeys designed to streamline the navigation.

TheAction app resides in the status bar, so if you want to access the search bar, you must click on the associated menulet. However, in the TheAction Preferences window, you can also setup a system-wide hotkey to activate the panel.

Once you input a keyword in the search bar, TheAction will start showing possible results, and you can navigate the list using the arrow keys. To launch any of the entries, just press the return key.

Note that TheAction also comes with a collection of hotkeys that can be used to quickly select the previous or next item, or to switch to the default, next, or previous kind.

You can use keyboard combinations to preview the item using QuickLook, or to reveal the object in a Finder window.

By default, TheAction is displaying in the results list only applications or System Preferences files.

Nonetheless, via the Preferences window, you can add additional types of files to the results list: folders, definitions, contacts, images, movies, music, PDFs, fonts, spreadsheets, emails, messages, and more.

TheAction should also be able to run custom scripts as applications, yet during our tests, we have not been able to configure any script in the Actions window.

To sum up, TheAction is an app launcher that relies on the Spotlight design and capabilities, yet allows you to filter further the search results, and comes with time efficient navigation options.

On the developer’s website, you can see a small usage guide for the TheAction app, but the explanations are not detailed enough.