This app is no longer under active development, and will not receive any further fixes from me.
You are welcome to make improvements to the source code on GitHub.

Launchpad Editor

For Mac OS X 10.7 Lion & 10.8 Mountain Lion

Group, organise and rearrange a large number of applications in Launchpad with ease.

Apple’s Launchpad is a new feature in OS X Lion that provides access to all of your apps in a simple, iOS-like way.

But if you have a large number of apps, it can be cumbersome to organise them all. To move to a new page, you have to drag and wait for every page in between to scroll into view. Similarly, creating groups requires long pauses while you wait for your actions to register.

Launchpad Editor allows you to do these tasks faster by transforming your Launchpad icons into a simpler and more familiar list view, like Finder. You can then simply drag and drop to arrange however you wish. Launchpad Editor can also create new pages and groups.

If you only have a few apps that you use regularly, Launchpad Editor probably isn’t for you: it doesn’t do anything above or beyond Launchpad’s built-in capabilities; it only does it faster. But if you find yourself frustrated by how long it takes to organise your Launchpad, you may find Launchpad Editor useful.

You can find more about the how and why in this blog post.

Screen shot

Caveats

I made Launchpad Editor because I wanted to use it myself, so I made every attempt to be careful in how I wrote it. That said, use Launchpad Editor with the understanding that you do so at your own risk.

Prior art