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The Ubuntu HUD - you love it or you hate it. Personally I rather like a classic desktop, so I use Xfce and Cinnamon, and I don't want to lose my menu in applications.

But the HUD is pretty awesome when your menus are complex and you forgot where an option sits. This makes that search trick very interesting.

I know the HUD is Unity specific. I am looking for a HUD-like tool to complement the menu in shells other than Unity.

There is Appmenu Runner for KDE that does this. There is also appmenu-qt for KDE.

Problem with the above is that it uses KDE libs, and it only works for KDE apps.

This is Linux, there aught to be something like this for GNOME/GTK apps, right?

Looking for any tool that can search the menus. I already use(d) Kupfer and GNOME Do, something like that would suffice if only it includes searching the menus for the currently focussed application.

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+1 I'd like to see something similar to the HUD for other GTK based Desktops, but not in the in-your-face kind of way as it is now, and such a thing that worked as a plugin for Synapse, Kupfer and Gnome do would be awesome. – Uri Herrera May 17 '12 at 22:40
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It should be possible to build a desktop-independent app for the HUD. It runs as a DBus service on Ubuntu, so someone "just" needs to write a nice UI to query it. – James Jun 9 '12 at 3:25
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So maybe a Gnome-Do plugin querying the DBus service would be an interesting goal for some developer. :) – Redsandro Jun 11 '12 at 20:53

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

i would recommend:

awesome-wm conky

and have a look here: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/best-linux-desktop-search-tools

:D

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Some instructions on how to duplicate the HUD's functionality would certainly be helpful. Also, the link only appears to include utilities for searching files instead of menus. – WarriorIng64 Oct 26 '12 at 20:27
Is it possible to get the list of commands from conky using a command-line interface? – Anderson Green Nov 13 '12 at 17:40
up vote -2 down vote

There's just such a tool integrated into Gnome3 -- it works nearly identically. I still can't find what the Gnome team named it! But it's there at http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ under the heading "Everything at your fingertips". There's also a YouTube video for your viewing pleasure.

Some of the fans of these new search systems say that HUD seems to do a "deeper" search while the Gnome equivalent is more configurable. Just hit the "Super" ("Win") key to call it. As usual, YMMV.

Ubuntu and Gnome are collaborating more closely (again), and 12.10 will probably have better Gnome library and code integration. Personally, I like the new features, but do NOT like banishing the old ones. Giving the users the choice to configure the toolkit at their disposal would be ideal.

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This is not a menu-search-tool. For example, you cannot enter uni and get the menu-item File>Tools>Encoding>Unicode from the browser. This is just for starting apps, Gnome3 and Cinnamon have had this from the start, and is unrelated to the HUD. Thanks for trying though. – Redsandro Jun 22 '12 at 19:57
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Sorry 'bout that, Redsandro -- I tried several HUD-look-alikes, and while they collectively implement some excellent ideas, I am very visually oriented and need a system of visual affordances. I'll keep an eye on this topic to see what will develop, and upvote it as soon as my numeric reputation improves %^) – Dogmug Jun 24 '12 at 11:40

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