{"id":26,"date":"2005-10-02T20:28:04","date_gmt":"2005-10-02T19:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/?p=26"},"modified":"2006-06-19T22:58:55","modified_gmt":"2006-06-19T20:58:55","slug":"deskbar-applet-hotness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/2005-10-02\/deskbar-applet-hotness","title":{"rendered":"deskbar-applet hotness"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Deskbar Applet<\/h3>\n<p>Recently Nigel Tao posted on <a href=\"http:\/\/mail.gnome.org\/archives\/desktop-devel-list\/2005-September\/msg00039.html\">desktop-devel<\/a> the announce of deskbar-applet, which was intended as a browser-like keyword-driven url bar. You type a web address, or an email address, or a file name, or some keyword then the arguments, an it shows a popup with possible choices from there, like &#8220;Search google for foo&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>See <a href=\"http:\/\/browserbookapp.sourceforge.net\/deskbar-screencast.html\">this screencast<\/a> to see the original idea.<\/p>\n<p>I offered to help and we moved the code to gnome CVS under the &#8220;deskbar-applet&#8221; cvs module, see instructions at the end of the post to get and try it.<\/p>\n<h3>Features<\/h3>\n<p>We then worked to integrate it a bit more in the desktop, so here are some highlights:<\/p>\n<p>Type a filename in your home dir, like <code>~\/Report.pdf<\/code> or <code>foo\/bar.txt<\/code>, and you can open that file with the associated applications. Also works with directories.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-3.png\" alt\"Files\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-4.png\" alt\"Dirs\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Type an email address or website name, and you can write a new mail, or surf the website with associated apps.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-7.png\" alt\"Email\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-8.png\" alt\"Websites\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-9.png\" alt\"Email\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Type some terms and it will search through all available programs (the .desktop files). Try for example &#8220;text&#8221; and you are presented with gvim and gedit, type music and you get rhythmbox, muine banshee and other apps like that, you can then launch the program<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-2.png\" alt\"Programs\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-5.png\" alt\"Programs\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Terms are also matched against mozilla\/firefox\/epiphany bookmarks, so if you have a bookmark for <a href=>Entagged Website<\/a>, typing entagged will offer you to launch the browser to that address.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-1.png\" alt\"Bookmarks\" \/><\/p>\n<p>deskbar-applet will also use your smart bookmarks wisely. type a search term (&#8220;steve&#8221; for example), you are then presented a list of smart bookmarks to use with the entered term. I have a Gnome Bugs bookmark in epiphany, that i use with bug numbers, i can enter a number in deskbar-applet and select the &#8220;Search Gnome Bugs for 10000&#8221; entry and be there. Same with google for example. This stuff will soon work with firefox, allowing to use its search engines.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-7.png\" alt\"Smart Bookmarks\" \/><\/p>\n<p>More a gadget: type a gtk bookmark (the ones shown in the file selector) and you can open nautilus in it<\/p>\n<p>And you can also get rid of mini-commander applet, since typing a program name allows you to open it directly<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/images\/deskbar-applet-6.png\" alt\"Mini Commander Replacement\" \/><\/p>\n<h3>TODO<\/h3>\n<p>Some things that are left to do:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Use galago python bindings (which are coming, according to ChipX86) to autocomplete emails by name and addresses, and also integrate with gaim contacts, allowing to send IM&#8217;s by typing the name.<\/li>\n<li>Use beagle, when available to do some background querying of typed terms<\/li>\n<li>React to filesystem changes through gnome-vfs monitoring to add on-the-fly newly installed programs<\/li>\n<li>Support for recent files<\/li>\n<li>A sane way to handle caching and presenting a good (not too long) list of matches<\/li>\n<li>More in the <code>TODO<\/code> file in the archive\/CVS<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We would really appreciate any contribution: ideas or backends, core code, etc.<\/p>\n<p>Also worth mentioning is the fact that the startup isn&#8217;t threaded and takes some time because it must index all the interesting files each time. This has to be improved of course.<\/p>\n<h3>Try it !<\/h3>\n<p>I updated the tarball a couple of hours ago wwith an updated version which fixes lots of small bugs, like missing file existance checks and data sanity, redownload if you got an old version.<\/p>\n<h4>CVS<\/h4>\n<p>Deskbar-applet can be checked out with:<\/p>\n<p><code>cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.gnome.org:\/cvs\/gnome co deskbar-applet<\/code><\/p>\n<h4>Tarball<\/h4>\n<p>Grab <a href=\"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/files\/deskbar-applet-0.5.0.tar.gz\">the 0.5 tarball here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h4>Gentoo<\/h4>\n<p>For gentoo users there is an ebuild in <a href=\"https:\/\/svn.breakmygentoo.org\/bmg-main\/gnome-extra\/deskbar-applet\/\">BreakMyGentoo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h4>Building and running<\/h4>\n<p>It requires python 2.3 and the 2.12 version of gnome-python and gnome-python-extras. Then:<\/p>\n<p><code>.\/configure; make; sudo make install<\/code><\/p>\n<p>You can also test it uninstalled by running the <code>.\/deskbar\/deskbar-applet -w<\/code> in the source directory, this will create the search bar in a standalone window.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Deskbar Applet Recently Nigel Tao posted on desktop-devel the announce of deskbar-applet, which was intended as a browser-like keyword-driven url bar. You type a web address, or an email address, or a file name, or some keyword then the arguments, an it shows a popup with possible choices from there, like &#8220;Search google for foo&#8221;. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-planet-gnome","category-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raphael.slinckx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}