I have a Mac laptop, which I am very fond of; and on it I use Quicksilver which I find inordinately useful (to the point that I have trouble using other people’s Macs if they don’t have it). There is a project available entitled Gnome Launchbox which claims to be an effort to do a similar thing for Linux, which I’ve been meaning to experiment with for ages.
First order of business: upgrade to etch, as GLB requires evolution-data-server 1.2. I was expecting this to be a nuisance, & possibly lead to an exciting couple of hours of post-upgrade fixing. However, in fact it all went absolutely smoothly. I am most impressed (not to mention relieved, as I have a whole bunch of machines to upgrade when it finally gets released).
However, gnome-launchbox was still no go; the version of GTK-2.0 required is 2.10, and etch only provides 2.8.20. I’m not sufficiently keen on this exercise to start building from source or hauling in packages from unstable. I tried the 0.1 release (current is 0.2) but that produced weird make errors.
The next possibility was Katapult. Which may or may not be a good piece of software; sadly their webpage times out so I can’t find out.
Anyone encountered anything else that has a similar function? I may just switch window managers (I’ve been recommended xfce) and start setting up lots of keyboard shortcuts…
I believe the Deskbar Applet (which i think is now part of GNOME 2.18): http://raphael.slinckx.net/deskbar/ may help you, or Beagle (which integrates really well with deskbar actually) or Gimmie: http://beatnik.infogami.com/Gimmie or a combination of all the above may assist.
Katapult is available as an official package for Debian testing (etch) and unstable. However, I'm convinced that you will be disappointed with its current functionality.
Michael - thanks. I've just tried it, & you're right, it's really not worth using yet :-/
Nick - thanks also! I'll have a look at those later.
Just installed the Deskbar Applet & it looks pretty good - thanks for the tip!
I've tried xfce (in Ubuntu) and it is really nice. There is a distro with a live CD with debian testing and enlightenment out there somewhere, I tried that as well and it was pretty good too. Lots of good window managers out there these days, I like fluxbox a lot as well.
You may already be aware of this project, but Gnome Do [1] is very similar to Launchbox and actually looks a bit more like Quicksilver than Launchbox does (if that's important to anyone).
I don't yet know much about their architecture or extensibility (it's mono-based), but it is easy to install via the authors PPA on Launchpad [2].
I actually wandered her after reading about discussion on Mozilla Labs of adding something like this to Firefox 3 [3]. Wouldn't that be nice. :)
[1] http://do.davebsd.com/
[2] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3759210
[3] http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/07/the-graphical-keyboard-user-interface/
Thanks Benjamin - I'll take a look at it.
I do like the Firefox 3 idea :)
gnome do is what you're after. http://do.davebsd.com/