Launchers for Linux I – GnomeDO

When I started using Linux I was amazed by the way I could tweak my system. I love to have my system unique. The days I used windows I had the task bar on the left side and did a lot of other stuffs. I liked the OS X look and thus installed kiba-dock, avant-window-manager and cairo-dock. All of them very brilliant and in many ways beats the Mac dock too. But I wanted more. And thus started my search and eventually found two awesome launchers GnomeDO and Easystroke.

GnomeDO is a Launcher that may strike to be very different from the normal mac clones and others. The functionality of this one beats the others. Let me first start with the process of installation and then carry on to describe what is able to do.

For the fedora users simply yum it:

yum install gnome-do

For the others just follow this link: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomeDo/Installation

Now that installation is complete lets launch it and then see its features. Launching seemed to be easy, but I had to do some initial configurations. Look at the bottom to see the configurations.*

Just click on the icon or press Super+space (or any other key you assigned while configuration*) you will see a window open up similar to the one below.

Starting applications can be a cup cake. If you want to launch firefox just type web:

If you want to add an album to your playlist just type the name of the album or artist. Here I have typed in bob:

Opening folders can be fun. I have a folder named file. If I type file the folder pops up and I can navigate through the sub folders and open files from there:

You can also shutdown you computer, log out from the current user and other session options too:

These are just the basic options. You can send a mail to the users in your contacts provided you have them in evolution, send messages to the buddies in pidgin and many more. To add more they have an option to install plugins. Plugins can be found here. To install plugins just download the .dll files into ~/.local/share/gnome-do/plugins directory and restart GnomeDO (execute pkill gnome-do in a terminal).

The GnomeDO is an excellent launcher. For those who don’t like to copy the mac and use more of the keyboard, this is one alternative. You can find their home page here.

*CONFIGURATIONS:

Two ways you can launch it:

I. Create a custom application launcher in the GNOME Panel.

Right click on the panel, Click on Add to Panel

Click on Custom Application Launcher

Just fill in as it is shown in the screenshot.

And every time you want to launch GnomeDO just click on the icon on the Panel.

II. Using a key board shortcut to launch it.

By default the GnomeDO launches using <Super>+Space keys together. If you do face problems you might have to set it manually. Install xbindkeys using

yum install xbindkeys
vi ~/.xbindkeysrc

add these lines at the end of the file

#Gnome-do
"gnome-do"
   Mod4+space

Thus you can have GnomeDO launch as soon as you type Super+space keys. You can configure it to any other key combination of your choice.