You are right, the hotkey window could benefit from a smaller view. I'll add this to the available views. The reason why each hotkey handler can display extra information is because two of the same type can do different things. For example you can have two slimSIZE hotkeys for moving windows to different locations. Or a more obvious duplicate: two slimLAUNCHthis hotkeys for launching different applications. But a view without this description can still make sense.
As for associating keywords to applications, that's done automatically by slimLAUNCH. That's its power! The first time you type "vs2", you probably won't see "Visual Studio 2002" at the top. You'll have a lot of matches in the list. But scroll down, find "Visual Studio 2002", and press Enter to launch it. Then, the next time you'll need to launch VS.NET 2002, type "vs2" again. Guess what? "Visual Studio 2002" will appear right at the top, ready for you to launch it by pressing Enter, without the need to scroll through the list.
One thing I want to add for the next release is the ability to associate a very different keyword with a program. What I'm planing to do is allowing you, once you have located a program by a few letters of its name, to press Alt-Enter and type a totally different keyword in a textbox that would popup. The program would then launch normally, and slimLAUNCH would remember that last keyword as the matching one.
For example, let's take VS.NET 2002 again. There is no way, for the moment, to
associate "oldvs" to that program, because if you type "oldvs", it
won't appear in the list. You would instead type "vs2002" (for example), then Alt-Enter, then "oldvs", then Enter. VS.NET 2002 would start. From now on, you would simply need to type "oldvs" and Enter to launch it.