AppMenu Runner, meet the KDE’s HUD

[menotu]

By afiestas - February 9th, 2012 afiestas blog  

A few days ago Mark Shuttleworth announced the HUD menu, a  Unity dialog that lets you trigger menu actions in the focused application like:

    look for bookmarks,
    change your IM status
    execute an action contained in the menu bar.

This kind of features as well of how they are executed may sound familiar to you dear Plasma Worksapce user… Exactly! I’m referring to our beloved KRunner!

KRunner can do a lot of stuff in both global and active application scope (though it tends to offer more global features) , just to mention a few: Math, Bookmarks, Files, Calendar, Contacts, Emails, Devices, Change IM Status, Recent documents…

I have to say that I’m glad to see Unity going into this direction since it is something that we (KDE Community) have believe in for years, so having Canonical and its designer team walking into the same direction may indicate that we are not wrong or at least we are not the only ones mistaken icon smile AppMenu Runner, meet the KDEs HUD

Despite KRunner being able to do a lot of things it couldn’t do something the HUD does, execute actions contained in the menu. No less than 7 months ago I did my first attempt on achieve exactly that and of course I blogged about it. I didn’t continue with the effort mainly because: kdelibs was frozen, it worked only for KDE applications, it worked only if the menu bar was shown within the window.

After watching the HUD video I got inspired and motivated to create a Runner which will use the same technology as HUD (and the oxygen-appmenu or the plasma-menubar plasmoid) to look and execute menu bar actions, this is the result

There are a few things to work on but I hope to put this in KDE Plasma Worksapce 4.9 if the Plasma teams like it of course.

KDE AppMenu Runner

[Just18]

I can understand - if you normally have a window maximised - that putting the menu bar on screen top might be desirable. Not for me I think .....  and at this stage all that typing in place of clicking would not go down so well 

[aguila]

If you want to type you gotta know what you're looking for - clicking you can search. On the other hand, keeping your fingers on the keyboard and getting everywhere with the keyboard is much much quicker. But, oh, the learning curve.... 

[GoustiFruit]

Yeah, that's why they created shortcuts ! Rename: F2; Undo: Ctrl+Z; Preferences: Ctrl+P. And so on. If you know what' you're looking for, keyboard shortcuts are the fastest way to go. If you don't know, I guess browsing the menus can be very slow. Maybe that HUD can be useful in this case, only if it smart enough to do good suggestions, based on human language for example (and international).