14 DAY TRIAL // Frequently installing and removing applications inevitably leads in some cases to shortcuts being left on the system. Besides the fact that they will make your desktop and Start menu hard to navigate, they are also pointless (both literally and figuratively speaking). It is just unnecessary clutter that needs to be shoveled off your computer.
Nearly all system maintenance utilities on the market reserve a section for cleaning out broken shortcuts on the computer. However, I haven’t seen an application to be built specifically for this sort of job; until now. Nir Sofer’s ShortcutsMan has no other purpose than scanning your desktop and Start menu for links and present the all to you, in a list.
Like all of Nir Soffixer’s software, ShortcutsMan is also free of charge and portable starting this version, when the developer decided to put all user settings in a CFG file in the storage location of the executable, instead of sending them to Windows Registry. So besides the fact that you won’t pay a dime to use it, you can also enjoy its abilities on other computers as well.
The interface is no fancy thing, a general trait for all the products of this developer as aesthetics has never been of much importance for him. As soon as you start it ShortcutsMan will instantly populate the list with all the links it can find on your desktop and the Start menu. One may think small numbers, but on a fairly fresh installed system the app found no less than 102 shortcuts. The elevated number comes from the fact that absolutely everything is indexed, not just user-installed software. As such the list will also display the links for utilities that come with the operating system: character map, Windows Calculator, shortcut to the defragging utility, sidebar, snipping tool, task scheduler, etc.
Besides showing all these shortcuts, the program can also offer important details about them. One of the most important is if it is broken or not. Apart from spelling it to you in a column, ShortcutsMan also highlight the orphaned links in red and gives you the possibility to delete them (right click on the item and check the menu). More information about the items in the list is available in each of the columns present. These give you the path of the file they link to, arguments (where available) or the location it starts in. More than this, you get the modification date and a brief description (if provided in the executable). All these details are also present in the Properties window of each item in the list that can be accessed from the context menu.
In our case it appeared like the application fluked and listed the same shortcut twice. However, digging deeper into the matter we noticed that the storage paths of the seemingly identical listings are different. This can be easily checked by viewing the Properties of the item.
The bundle of options ShortcutsMan puts at your disposal is very light, as the application is designed mainly to extract information about the links on the system. However, there are customization options for the columns in the main view of the program, so you can choose to view only the most relevant ones for you. On the same note, the grid lines can be erased, although this would make tracking information a bit more difficult. If you do not wish for the product to highlight broken shortcuts, this can be arranged from the “Options” menu.
Saving reports of all the shortcuts is an easy job in ShortcutsMan, despite the fact that there isn’t a specific function to let you do just that. The app can show all detected items as HTML reports (very useful in some cases) which are automatically saved in your default web browser’s temporary folder. You can either dig in the temporary location for the file or you can save it to the desired path straight from the browser.
Creating reports only with some items is another trick ShortcutsMan can do. Simply pick the lines you want to be included in the log file and choose from the context menu the options to view the HTML report of the selected items. A set of selected items can also be saved to TXT file. The information included in the resulting file comprises every detail available in the Properties sheet of the links, formatted in a readable manner.
ShortcutsMan is a comfortable application to hunt broken links. It lists all the shortcuts on the desktop and the Start menu and extracts usable information about them. Highlighting orphaned shortcuts makes it easy to pinpoint them in the list and eliminate them.
You can customize which information you want to view in the application window as well as reorganize the columns the way they better fit your need. Follow me on Twitter @Ionut_Ilascu
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