Launch your programs faster with Katapult
Submitted by srlinuxx on Monday 28th of May 2007 09:48:45 PM
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One of the biggest navigational issues with any operating system is using program menus. Windows users have to open the Start Menu, scan for the program, realize that the program is probably in the subfolder under the programmer’s name, scan the appropriate subfolder, and then click on the program’s icon. Macintosh users must open Finder, find and click on the Applications folder, and then search for the program’s name. GNOME and KDE users have an advantage: they have categories in their respective Applications and K menus. However, it is still hard to find programs (and what if you look for Thunderbird in Office, and then realize it is under Internet?). One of the biggest reasons that the Quicksilver keystroke application launcher is so popular with the Macintosh users. All that is required is hitting Ctrl (or Command) + Space, and then typing a name to launch the program. Luckily, OS X users aren’t the only ones that have this great feature. KDE users have the great, free-as-in-speech, Katapult.
Katapulting yourself into action
Since many KDE distributions include or offer packages for it, Katapult is extremely easy to install. After doing so, open Katapult (under the Utilities menu in K Menu, or by typing Alt-F2 and then katapult) and it will display an “Application successfully started” message. To begin Katapulting, type Alt + Space (Bar). Type in a program name that is in the K Menu, such as Konqueror (Katapult will only index programs in the K Menu), and hit Enter when the Konqueror icon comes up. Voila! Konqueror will launch. You can also just type konq, wait for the Konqueror icon to come up, and hit Enter. To close the Katapult window (note that Katapult will stay open, so you can still hit Alt + Space to bring it forward), wait for a few seconds or click outside of the Katapult window.
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Novell's Beagle search does a better job
although it's eats a big bit of your valuable ram, it can find you applications, documents, webpages, emails & chat-logs related to your search subject in a categorised menu, in a matter of seconds, and can be launched with few stokes on your keyboard or at your fingertips from Gnome/KDE main-menu (in suse)
these both seem to be overkill
if i have to navigate several layers into the menu system to find a program that i think i might use fairly often, when i get there i right click on the menu and put it on the desktop. how hard is that? and it doesn't eat up memory.