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Quick Ways to Start Programs in X11 Environments

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ewemoa:
I didn't quite get FARR working via WINE (though it seemed remarkably close to working), so I've been trying out a few alternatives:

kupfer - very similar to QuickSilver -- used this one for a while but am taking a break from it
fbrun - similar to the "Run..." dialog, comes with fluxbox
dmenu-launch - dmenu-based launcher

Anyone else have favorites or things worth pointing out?

Gothi[c]:
I personally bind keys to launch my most used applications. (It helps I have a keyboard with extra keys)

For anything else I use dmenu-launch which for me is good enough.

For other search specific thingies I prefer small utilities I can fire off in a terminal and pipe to whatever I need rather than a monolithic gui app anyway :)

ewemoa:
Just a standard keyboard here :)

According to the local ~/.fluxbox/keys, I've been using Exec for two things -- launching a terminal and dmenu-launch.

That works ok for the most part here -- until I forget the name of something...sometimes searching my shell's history helps, but this is a situation where I've been helped by hierarchical menus (rediscovery).  I used xdg-menu to generate some menus per the instructions here:

Quick Ways to Start Programs in X11 Environments

Gothi[c]:
If you're interested in rediscovery:

On Gentoo you can do something like this to find all binaries in all installed packages


--- ---for pkg in `eix -I --only-names`; do echo -e "$pkg : \n"; (equery files $pkg | grep -i 'bin/'); done

It produces something like:


--- ---app-accessibility/espeak :
/usr/bin/espeak

app-accessibility/festival :
/usr/bin/audsp
/usr/bin/festival

app-accessibility/flite :
/usr/bin/build_flite
/usr/bin/dump_cst_regexes
/usr/bin/dump_us_regexes
/usr/bin/find_sts
/usr/bin/flite
/usr/bin/flite_sort
/usr/bin/flite_time
/usr/bin/huff_table
/usr/bin/regexcomp
/usr/bin/setup_flite
/usr/bin/t2p

I imagine other package managers have similar ways of doing stuff like that.
You can get pretty creative with these things in order to produce something searchable or generate menu's.

ewemoa:
Here is something that's not quite as nice, but similar for Arch:

for pkg in `pacman -Q | awk '{print $1}'`; do echo -e "$pkg:"; pacman -Q -l $pkg|grep bin/ | awk '{print $2}'; echo; done

--- End quote ---

Automatically generating things to provide a basis for something does seem like it could be helpful.

I wish though that certain kinds of things in my shell history would be "sticky" (i.e. not get deleted).  Hmm, perhaps I can take notes containing specific invocations along with descriptions in org-mode and generate part of my shell history...

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