[polyvertex]

I've been a long time and happy user of Launchy. It's a great tool and you might have noticed the small tribute to it in Keypirinha by using the term "Catalog" to name its internal database :)

Keypirinha is more modern than Launchy in many ways and integrates better in recent Windows platforms (for example I've had troubles due to 64-bit platforms with Launchy; items not found or not launchable, ...). The search accuracy is very much improved as well. You can have machine and/or user-specific configuration in a portable way. In addition to that, Keypirinha is more easily extensible, it embeds a Python interpreter to load its plugins (whereas you had to compile a C++ plugin to do the same job with Launchy; I wasn't happy with the unofficial Launchy-Python plugin). That gives the user the power to modify the existing official plugins (they are open-source), or to create new plugins that fit her needs (that slowly leads us towards your "searching scope" question).

Keypirinha is also very young compared to venerable Launchy so its plugins catalog has yet to be "flourished".

Hope that answers your question regarding Keypirinha vs. Launchy.

Regarding the "searching scope" question, please follow the discussion on GitHub at: https://github.com/Keypirinha/Keypirinha/issues/3