Dave turned me on a week or so ago to a great tool called SlickRun, which they describe as “a floating command line window”.

I simply describe it as a must-have for any keyboard junkie.

One of the coolest features are 'Magic Words' - that is, aliases for your shortcuts. You can set up cnn to open http://www.cnn.com or proj to open the latest VS.NET solution you are working in. It even has a dropper so you can automatically pick up the shortcut of a program already running.

There are two other subtle features that I find make a big difference:

• The ability to type slashstar.com (or some other domain without the www) and open up the Internet shortcut. The run dialog will work for www.slashstar.com but not slashstar.com.
• Being able to see the date on the desktop without having to hover over the taskbar.

Of course, it's a pretty simple but quite powerful tool and there are various other features - such as setting up input dialogs for your shortcut - that are very neat. Dave is a big fan of the Jot window, though I personally prefer OneNote and its sidenotes for any quick notes I want to take.

This comes from Bayden Systems, who have a number of other very cool utilities also available for free on their site. I'm not sure what the relationship is between Bayden Systems (who make this utility) and Fiddler - Fiddler isn't linked of their homepage, but previous versions of the site pointed to http://www.bayden.com/fiddler (which is how I think Dave stumbled on it in the first place).

And best of all, it's free.