Heimdall

A fast, tiny, glass launcher for Windows.
Press Alt + Space, type a few letters, hit Enter. That's it :)

Install · Using it · Settings · Benchmarks · Building

I wanted something like Spotlight on Windows that opens instantly, finds any file on any drive, and actually looks good doing it. I'd been using Flow Launcher for around a year and a half before this, and it's great, but it's a 250 MB .NET app with a plugin system I never really used. Everything is incredibly fast, but it's a file list, not a launcher.

Heimdall sits somewhere in between. It's two native executables, under 2 MB together, with no Electron, WebView, .NET or plugin runtime. It searches your apps, files and Windows settings, does quick maths, switches windows, and stays out of your way the rest of the time. Since switching, I honestly haven't felt the need to go back :)

Yes, this thing is fast af.

_{r/windowsapps}

Its flawless app, i really love it.

_{issue #1}

It's lightweight, looks beautiful, and the search speed is excellent. I can see myself using it as my daily launcher.

_{issue #2, switching from Flow Launcher}

Thank you all for the lovely feedback, it genuinely made my day. Most of 1.0.1 came straight from your comments and issues.

• Leave folders and drives out of search. Add them to exclude in the config, like exclude = ['D:', 'C:\Windows', 'node_modules'], or type -in:node_modules for a single search.
• Corners: round, Windows (the same smaller radius Windows 11 uses) or square.
• Animations can be turned off, so everything appears instantly.

• The hotkey no longer stops working after the first press when a maximized window is open on a screen without a visible taskbar (auto-hide, or a second monitor). Game mode thought those windows were fullscreen games.
• Upgrading keeps the file indexer running. Before, installing over an older version could leave the indexer service stopped.
• Base64. Type b64 hello to encode or b64d aGVsbG8= to decode, Enter copies the result.
• Scoop support, see Install.

• Alt+Space by default, and you can change the hotkey from inside Heimdall now. Just type settings.
• A settings page for the hotkey, theme, glass, shadow, tray icon and starting with Windows. No more digging through a config file for the basics.
• A tray icon, so there's always an obvious way to get to settings or quit.
• Windows settings search. Type bluetooth, dark mode, display or uninstall and jump straight to the right page.
• A right-click menu on results: Open with, Open file location, Copy path, Properties and Run as administrator.
• More filters, like type:image, type:video or type:code, plus a ? page that lists all of them.
• An adjustable shadow (normal, soft or off), and a cleaner light mode.
• A proper installer, which also sets up the fast file indexer for you.
• Single letter searches are over 2x faster, and two letter ones got quicker too, so Heimdall now beats Everything on every query in the benchmark below.

1. Download Heimdall-1.0.3-x64-setup.exe from the latest release and run it. Windows will ask for admin once, which is for the file indexer service.
2. Press Alt + Space.

The installer puts Heimdall in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Heimdall, adds it to the Start menu and the tray, starts it, and sets it to start with Windows.

scoop bucket add heimdall https://github.com/Kryzern/Heimdall
scoop install heimdall/heimdall

Type and press Enter. Apps, files, folders and everything below come back in one ranked list, and the results you pick move up for the same query next time. If you ever forget something, just type ?.

You can also drag any file result straight into another app.

Type settings in Heimdall, or right-click the tray icon and pick Settings. To change the hotkey, select Hotkey, press Enter, then press your new shortcut. Theme, glass, shadow, corners, animations, the tray icon and starting with Windows all change with one Enter each.

Everything else lives in %APPDATA%\Heimdall\config.toml, which gets created the first time Heimdall runs. Changes there apply the next time Heimdall opens.

hotkey = "Alt+Space"          # or "F5", "Ctrl+Shift+K", ...
passthrough = ["chrome.exe"]  # apps where the hotkey keeps its normal meaning
game_mode = true              # release the hotkey while a fullscreen game has focus
theme = "system"              # "dark" or "light"
accent = "system"             # or a colour like "#7C9CFF"
glass = "liquid"              # "auto" follows Windows transparency, "solid" is opaque
shadow = "normal"             # "soft" or "off"
corners = "round"             # "windows" for Windows 11's smaller corners, or "square"
animations = true             # false makes everything appear instantly
exclude = ['D:', 'C:\Windows', 'node_modules']  # left out of file search
width = 680.0
max_results = 8
show_recent = true
start_with_windows = true
tray = true                   # icon in the notification area

[[web]]
key = "g"
name = "Google"
url = "https://www.google.com/search?q={q}"

If you pick a key that apps use themselves, like F5, add those apps to passthrough so the key still works there. Coming from Flow Launcher? Type import flow to bring your web searches over.

Most glass effects are just a blur with a white border. I wanted the panel to feel like an actual piece of glass, which mostly means paying attention to the edges.

• Near the rim, the background is pulled from just outside the panel, so whatever is behind it bends around the border.
• Red and blue split very slightly in that bevel.
• A thin highlight sits on the side of the rim facing a light, and the light follows the selected row.
• The frost adapts to whatever's behind each pixel, so text stays readable over a white page or a dark wallpaper.
• The selection is a smaller piece of thicker glass with its own rim, sliding between rows on a spring.

All of it is one pixel shader. The desktop behind the panel is captured once when Heimdall opens, mip-mapped on the GPU, and sampled from there. Nothing is drawn unless something changes, so Heimdall uses no CPU or GPU while it's hidden. It drops to a solid panel on battery saver or over Remote Desktop.

• One arena per drive. Every filename on a volume sits in one contiguous block of bytes, with a lowercase copy at the same offsets. A search is a SIMD substring scan over that block, split across every core.
• Three stages. The scan finds candidates, a cheap name score narrows them down, and only the best few hundred get their full path built and scored. Folders like node_modules, caches and AppData rank lower, while your Desktop, Documents and Downloads rank higher.
• Short queries take a different path. One or two letters match most of the index, so Heimdall skips the candidate list completely and scores every name in a single pass, keeping only the best few hundred as it goes.
• Typing narrows. When repo becomes repor, Heimdall filters the previous results instead of scanning again.
• Input comes first. The window handles every pending key before drawing a frame, and file search runs at a lower priority than the UI.
• No paths in memory. Each file is a 16-byte entry. Full paths are only built for the rows actually on screen.

heimdall-bench (included in the zip) builds the index and times queries against Heimdall's engine and against a running copy of Everything. These numbers are from my machine: 8 threads, four drives, 3.77 million files, median of 20 runs.

To be fair to Everything, these aren't perfectly like for like:

• Heimdall's times are measured inside the engine, while Everything's include its IPC round trip.
• Everything returns matches sorted by name. Heimdall returns them ranked, which in my opinion is the part that actually saves you time.
• The index here was built by the directory-walk fallback. Run the benchmark from an elevated prompt to measure the MFT path.

You'll need Rust on Windows.

git clone https://github.com/Kryzern/Heimdall.git
cd Heimdall
cargo test --workspace
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\packaging\package.ps1   # writes the zip, and the installer if Inno Setup 6 is installed

The workspace has four crates:

Issues and pull requests are always welcome, I'm happy to take a look at anything :)

Nothing leaves your machine. There's no telemetry and no update check, and Heimdall makes no network requests apart from the web searches you open yourself. Usage history is a local JSON file. Like Everything, the indexer service sees filenames across the whole drive, so any local user can search names (not contents).

MIT