Neat KDE Applications you probably did not know about.

[colo]

Hello, everyone!

There is so much great Free Software out there, you just cannot know every tool, application or program worth more than a quick look. But luckily, members of the community centering around GNU/Linux are here to hint you to the real jewels you might have missed otherwise

Let me be one of those friendly fellows today, and introduce you to one of my dearest little helpers, conceived to be run as a part of the K Desktop Environment: Katapult

So what's the fuzz about? What can this Katapult-thingie do for you? Well, a lot of neat things:

Katapult is an application for KDE, written in C++, designed to allow faster access to applications, bookmarks, and other items. It is plugin-based, so it can launch anything that is has a plugin for. Its display is driven by plugins as well, so its appearance is completely customizable. It was inspired by Quicksilver for OS X.

Once installed and running, you interact with Katapult by pressing [ALT] + [SPACE] (of course you can remap this binding, according to your personal preference), and start typing...

Say, I hit Katapult's bind, followed by the letters "kon", i'll be presented with a semi-transparent overlay on my desktop, posing "konsole" in its center - once I hit [ENTER], "konsole", KDE's terminal emulator, fires up. This works with programs recorded in your K Menu, directories in your ~, bookmarks in Konqueror, many things in amarok, and - because of Katapult's nature of exentsibility via plug-ins, many, many other things not yet thought of, too.

Interested?

Well, head over to the KDE-Apps.org page, or, better yet, fetch it from your distro's package manager's repositories to give it a try. I bet you won't regret doing so

Cheers,
- colo


PS: You're welcome to present your very favourite program in this topic as well, of course

[James]

I discovered katapult fairly recently myself.
Katapult + Amarok is really awesome. You can start typing in a word from the song title, press enter and it will start playing (complete with the album art showing). It's very convenient for quickly throwing on a track.


More neat stuff: This isn't totally KDE specific, but klineakconfig + lineakd + KDE plugins provides a really nice way to set up an internet/multimedia keyboard to use all those extra buttons at the top that would otherwise be useless. I've got a bunch of buttons controlling amarok, one that locks the computer, etc.

[Rob Williams]

I just downloaded it to give it a try.. seems pretty sweet. I like how you can type in "Gi" and it automatically goes to The Gimp. I'll have to start using this.. seems like a great KDE extension.

Katapult + Amarok is really awesome. You can start typing in a word from the song title, press enter and it will start playing (complete with the album art showing).

Now THAT is cool. I am going to give that one a shot.

[eatmuchpie]

kompose is rather snazzy http://kompose.berlios.de/

It's like Expose on Mac (whereby you press a button, then al the windows appear tiled and you can select which one you want on screen). I have mine set up so it is activated when the cursor touches the bottom-right corner.

NB. Debian has it in its repository

EDIT: tried Katapult and it is really cool! Thanks for the great link!

[Michael]

One of the KDE apps I liked a few years back was Santafu (http://santafu.sourceforge.net/). Basically a nice (and simple) KDE front-end for LM_Sensors. It's development no longer seems to be active, but it was nice while it had lasted.

[Tsiolkovsky]

One of the little utilities I have recently discovered is YaKuake. It is a konsole which is normally hidden, but when you press the F12 key it drops down from the top of the scree, like the console in Quake for example. This way I can always have my console ready for a quick access and it doesn't clutter the taskbar.

[James]

The lastest version of KTorrent (2.02) supports encryption. This feature I know is very important to some users. Even if you don't need it, I recommend KTorrent as a client anyway.

[1c3d0g]

THank God! Finally a native BitTorrent client that supports Encryption. My ISP is beginning to mess with my downloads so this will be a good deterrent. Ha!