Launch programs from Start Menu from Emacs, using Helm.

Why would you want to do that?

• It actually makes sense if you agree that Helm is superior to the Start Menu/Screen search feature.
• Besides, it's Emacs, so why not?

Make sure MELPA or MELPA Stable is in your package-archives, then issue

M-x package-install RET helm-w32-launcher RET

Other installation methods are unsupported. If you can't or don't want to use MELPA, you'll have to remember to put helper-src in the same directory as the Emacs Lisp code and to set up autoloads and/or requires as necessary.

The first time one of the provided commands is called, the package tries to compile the C# helper. If you have .NET 2.0 or newer installed, this should just work, so any errors messages from csc.exe should be reported as bugs.

To run a program normally:

M-x helm-w32-launcher

To run a program with elevated privileges:

M-x helm-w32-launcher-elevated

To open a directory a shortcut is in:

M-x helm-w32-launcher-open-shortcut-directory

To open the property page of a shortcut:

M-x helm-w32-launcher-open-shortcut-properties

If helm-w32-launcher-use-cache is non-nil (the default), the Start Menu entries are cached to avoid process spawns and disk I/O. To flush the cache to see the current Start Menu contents, use

M-x helm-w32-launcher-flush-cache

Due to Emacs having no FFI to speak of, the code retrieving Start Menu directories is implemented in C#. Listing the entries is done there too, because directory-files-recursively requires Emacs 25, and System.IO.Directory.GetFiles is much nicer than manually implementing recursive search with directory-files.

The Emacs side does relatively little: it calls the C# code, reads the output using read, caches the entries, passes them to Helm and calls the C# code to act on the selection again.

The C# code actually executes the shortcut because even though w32-shell-execute exists, Emacs 24.3 and earlier use legacy codepage-based APIs, so they're unable to correctly start a shortcut from a path containing characters outside the current code page. .NET uses Unicode APIs, so it just works there.