A Small Holiday Gift: Tools for Flow Launcher Power Users

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Flow Launcher Plugin: Shortcuts and Shortcut Editor

This is a low-key release, offered in the spirit of Christmas Eve rather than a launch cycle.

Over the past little while I’ve been building a set of tools around Flow Launcher—tools I wanted for my own daily use, and which turned out to be broadly useful enough to justify cleaning up, documenting, and releasing publicly.

There’s no grand thesis here. Just three practical things, now open source:

  • A Flow Launcher plugin for managing shortcuts cleanly and sanely

  • A desktop editor that makes those shortcuts pleasant to work with

  • A developer skill / guide for people who want to build similar plugins themselves

All of it is MIT-licensed, free, and meant to be forked, modified, and quietly improved.

If you use Flow Launcher heavily, one or more of these may be useful to you.

1. Flow Launcher Shortcuts Plugin

Flow Launcher is already excellent, but I wanted a better way to manage frequently used paths, URLs, apps, and bookmarks—something structured, searchable, and predictable.

The result is the Flow Launcher Shortcuts Plugin, which adds a simple but flexible shortcut system directly into Flow.

You get:

  • Keyword-based access (s docs, s github, etc.)

  • Shortcuts for folders, files, apps, and URLs

  • Category grouping with explicit priority ordering

  • Per-shortcut icons

  • Context-menu actions for editing and management

  • A shortcutlist command that shows everything, grouped and ordered

  • Environment variable expansion (%USERPROFILE%, etc.)

It integrates cleanly with Flow Launcher’s JSON-RPC interface and behaves the way a native plugin should—fast, predictable, and unobtrusive.

This isn’t a flashy plugin. It’s meant to disappear into your workflow and stay there.

2. A Desktop Editor (Because JSON Should Be Optional)

Manually editing JSON for everyday workflow tools gets old fast. So alongside the plugin, I built a standalone desktop editor using PySide6 (Qt for Python).

The editor exists for one reason: to make shortcut management frictionless.

Features include:

  • A clean, modern Qt interface with proper dark-mode behavior

  • A table view of all shortcuts

  • Add / edit / delete dialogs with validation

  • Icon selection via file picker

  • Configurable storage location

  • Window state and settings persistence

  • A proper menu bar and About dialog

  • Automatic saving

The standout feature is browser bookmark import.

The editor can read bookmark data from Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera, recursively traverse folders, and let you selectively import bookmarks into Flow Launcher shortcuts. It handles non-standard locations and edge cases without drama.

This turns Flow Launcher into a fast, keyboard-driven bookmark launcher without requiring browser plugins or sync hacks.

3. Building Flow Launcher Plugins: Claude Skill and Practical Guide

While building the plugin, I ended up formalizing a lot of knowledge about how Flow Launcher plugins actually work in practice—what’s reliable, what’s fragile, and what patterns scale.

Rather than letting that knowledge evaporate, I wrote it down as a reusable developer skill / guide, structured so others can use it as a starting point for their own plugins.

It includes:

  • An overview of Flow Launcher’s plugin architecture

  • Common plugin patterns (search, actions, data-driven tools, utilities)

  • Production-ready templates

  • Notes on result ordering, scoring, context menus, and edge cases

  • Build and packaging guidance

  • Plugin Store submission workflow

If you’ve ever thought “I should write a Flow Launcher plugin someday,” this removes most of the archaeology phase.

Everything Is Open Source

All of this is available now:

Merry Christmas! Andy Moorer, Dec 24, 2025.