Unity Is A Launcher

A few years back, I bought a Mac, just to see what it was like. Nice box. I recommended Macs to my sisters, who are very happy with them. After a year or so, the motherboard died and I went back to Linux.

 When I had the Mac, on the advice of my Mac friends, I used Quicksilver.

Quicksilver's simply a great launcher. It lets you launch applications with just a keystroke or two, and learns what you want to do. It's been around for almost a decade. For Mac-heads, it's an integral part of the UI.

Other platforms were stuck with CLIs and menus for years, but eventually, some pretty good alternatives appeared. Launchy and GNOME-Do come to mind, but there are others.

By-and-bye, the Ubuntu folks decided, first for netbooks, then for everything, to jump, feet-first, into the launcher world, by making a launcher be the GUI. That's what Unity's really about. They call it a "heads-up display" or something.

People who've been using Linux for a while still try to navigate using the icons on the left. Yeah, you can do that, but it's clumsy so they complain. They want "real Linux."

I try to tell them it's like using a dime for a screwdriver: you can do it, but it isn't the right tool for the job. Once I'd rotated my brain to think of Unity as a launcher, I experienced a great sense of relief. (I'd used Quicksilver pretty steadily for a while, so it wasn't an unfamiliar way to work.)

To launch vinagre, I press the "Windows key" and an overlay pops up with lots of choices. I begin typing "vinagre" and, by the time I get to "vina", the only choice left is the "Remote Desktop Viewer" icon. I press "Enter" and it launches.  Boom.

If I want to read the pdf notes Karim passed out for the Beaglebone, I type "Windows-key" then "bea" and the first choice is "ea-beaglebone-120911.pdf" (which it has found in ~/Downloads, though it doesn't even bother to tell me that). I press <ENTER> and it launches the pdf viewer to let me see it.  No mousing, no searching, no clicking.

When I want more control than that, I pop up a terminal window and I'm back in what I think of as "real Linux."