KRunner, the “HUD” KDE vitamins

A couple of days techy wrote about HUD (Head-Up Display), an interesting development for Ubuntu users which will debut in the next version of the distribution. So far so good, but I was a little surprised that the court has given this ad in many media, including some not focused exclusively on the scene GNU / Linux.

Some of the publications echoed the new talk of “revolution”, “new paradigm” … Starting with Mark Shuttleworth himself, who titled his article for submission of HUD as “say hello to the future of the menus” (see link above). You forgot to put the tagline of “Ubuntu”.

say (to anyone angry I), we talk about an interesting development for Ubuntu, but for counting. A long time ago that KDE has a much more powerful than HUD, at least what has been seen so far. I mean, obviously, to KRunner, the aptly named Swiss army knife the desktop

commonly known as application launcher (Alt + F2), but KRunner is much more than that. Attentive to the following list of features (just type the first letters of the word, always without the quotes , to begin to appear results):

Lanza

applications, not only by name, also by type according to their description (for example, type “text” appear all related applications you have installed KWrite, Kate, Words, etc).

Lanza

Lanza

markers of all kinds, web-sites, plus search the browser history, and allows to directly use the shortcuts that are configured (by default only for Konqueror and rekonq).

Integrates with Nepomuk

It acts as a quick calculator, unit converter and spell checker, plus search for special characters.

Lanza

, called runners . Are installed separately, and find in KDE-Apps.org, but also in the repositories of your distro. The need to allow virtual machines to launch VirtualBox without opening the program, dents on Identi.ca publish, translate with Google Translate … or integrate Firefox, Opera and Chrome / Chromium on their findings, among others.

recap, HUD looks good, it sure is an important step to improve the experience Unity, and some exclusive little detail as support for voice commands promise further improvement seen, but from there to praise it as a revolution going … to be no. Indeed, such a useful tool as KRunner not worth the Alt + F2.

Updated: The first comment has left me stunned, because I forgot to explain something very important.

As Seen

, HUD includes menus, a way to control the application settings, a kind of finder / universal launcher as it were, dedicated to the application being used at that time.

I mean, is it better to write an “away” to check that such a state in the messaging client, rather than clicking an icon that does the same? I do not see it, so I understand that the odds go the other way, ie the shares. The concept is still a little green, but the possibilities shown me suggest this.

will remember that the first version of Unity was independent launchers for applications and locations, and the second integrated them into the dash, it was logical. I wonder if something similar will happen this time, but otherwise I think it would add to the confusion for the user: how many menus, launchers, etc. are required to manage a desktop and applications? Is it necessary for example Firefox is in the foreground to run HUD? Would be a delay, even with voice commands.

But, like the mouth is wrong, if I’m wrong, I have you for me aclaréis mind;)