Comment by wishiknew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wishiknew | Hacker News Reader

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I switched a few weeks ago because I was tired of OS X, too. I tried every distribution out there and the one I've kept is Debian Jessie. Debian is great in that it's a simple and stable Gnome experience. Linux can be much more dangerous than OS X in terms of applications crashing badly, so I like the fact that I have an OS that I have thoroughly tested, fixed, and that won't move much in years. And I can get both that and a few up to date packages thanks to package pinning.

Alfred is the tool that I was afraid I couldn't have. I tried a few solutions but they just didn't do it for me. Gnome's default search bar is hard to customize and the various launchers out there either installed huge libraries or weren't hidpi enabled. I ended up writing my own launcher. When I hit Win+Space, a terminal opens and runs a script of mine who relies on the fuzzy finder fzf by junegunn. I use it to open files, search the web, log me into websites automatically with KeePassX, handle the music that's being played, etc.

I actually wrote an article on this but I haven't had the time to create the blog I wanted to put it on. If you're interested, give me your email and I'll send it to you with the code I actually use.

I'm not familiar with these personally, but:

http://do.cooperteam.net/

Gnome Do looks like a Quicksilver clone. Seems stalled for a year.

https://github.com/ManuelSchneid3r/albert

Alfred-inspired, though possibly moving a little slow (no updates for a month, and those were readme/packaging). Claims to have a major refactor coming out this month.

https://github.com/qdore/Mutate

Alfred-inspired, looks active.

Mutate might be what I'd hitch my horse to, were I ok with something bleeding edge. Unsure if it supports complex workflows, though.

I have no experience with OS X and Alfred, but from what you describe it looks like krunner for the KDE desktop environment.

krunner is a mini-CLI you can open with alt-F2 by default (customizable of course). It allows searching apps or the web, opening web sites, search files, controlling music being played, or whatever really as it's extensible through plugins.

If using KDE is acceptable to you, you can learn more here: https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner

Alfred is awesome http://www.alfredapp.com/

It is based on an idea from an older launcher called Quicksilver http://qsapp.com/

These types of apps have existed in OS X for a long time. I'm kind of surprised that Linux doesn't have an equivalent yet, as pretty much any open-source dev who uses a Mac laptop knows about the above apps.

They have existed on Linux for just as long, it's just you Mac folks haven't heard of them as there's more choice, and all the major desktops have this functionality built in, at least as far as app launching goes - just press the windows key and start typing works in Unity & Gnome at least.

Less chance for market dominance from any one tool.

The coolest, ultra minimal yet featureful one is dmenu, which I haven't seen mentioned yet. Gnome-do, Kupfer are also good.

Nice.

In doing a bit of Googling of dmenu I found this

http://alternativeto.net/software/dmenu/?platform=mac

Which may be helpful for others as a general way to find alternatives for a given piece of software on other platforms.

Thanks for the link. I'm not a KDE person and never have been, but this is a great tool. I haven't been able to write a calculator nor a dictionary with my setup, for instance. I don't miss them that much from Alfred, but I would definitely use them if I had them.

Try Kupfer. Been using it for years with no complaints. http://engla.github.io/kupfer/

Tried every distribution out there - and you chose Debian Jessie over LinuxBBQ?

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