Quick Ways to Start Programs in X11 Environments

[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:

[Gothi[c]]

If you're interested in rediscovery:

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

Code

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

It produces something like:

Code

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

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...

[Edvard]

Have you tried Synapse?  No way it's even in the same ballpark as FARR, but it has a bunch of snazzy plugins, and is pretty darn snappy.
https://launchpad.net/synapse-project

[ewemoa]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I haven't tried it recently and there are two things about it that lead me to be wary: 1. Zeigeist and 2. Number of dependencies.

May be I will try it again anyway

[Edvard]

Holy Schmoly! NEVER MIND!!

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users's activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations. It makes this information readily available for other applications to use in the form of timelines and statistics. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns by applying data association algorithms such as "Winepi" and "A Priori"

Yipes!

[ewemoa]

Well, lucky for me, the package installation didn't work out anyway

[Tuxman]

I tried Synapse when I had a Mint box (for testing purposes). While Zeitgeist leaves be a bit confused, it's probably one of the best launchers out there. Right after the terminal, that is.

[Edvard]

I can report it IS quite snappy.  Zeitgeist is just kinda creepy.

[Tuxman]

Can't you just configure it to a less creepy extent?