Last time when I saw my Windows user friend showing off how fast he’s able to launch his application using ‘Launchy‘, I was so impressed and thinking why don’t we have similar application running in Ubuntu Desktop. So I did a search and finally I found an application called Gnome Do, a launcher allows you to quickly search for many items in your desktop environment. And it do not only allows you to search items, it also allows you to specify actions to perform on search results.

To install Gnome DO:

Steps

1. open terminal and type

sudo apt-get install gnome-do

2. Once Gnome Do is installed, first you need to manually run the application, then only you can summon it by pressing Super<Windows Key> + Space.

3. Instead of running Gnome-do manually everytimes, you can add Gnome-do to become startup programs. Just go to System>Preferences>Sessions>Startup Programs tab

• Click Add
• Enter any name on “Name:” field
• Enter “/usr/bin/gnome-do” on “Command:” field
• reboot

4. Now everytimes you login, Gnome-do will be running on backgroup. So you can summon gnome-do by only pressing Super<Windows Key> + Space

5. Done

To use Gnome-do, press the summon key and type the keyword of the file or application which you wanted to open or run.

Source: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomeDo