Gnome Do - An Intelligent Launcher Tool for Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint

When you have a lot of applications or files inside your computer, the first thing that may come to your mind is : search. You don’t want to find them manually. If you have a lot of files, you may waste a lot of time to search it manually.

Gnome Do

As an intelligent launcher Gnome-Do not only doing search, it also allows you to perform specific tasks on the search result such as run, email, open, play, chat, etc.

Installation of Gnome Do

To install Gnome Do under Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint, you can use following apt-get command to install it.

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-do

Once Gnome-Do is installed you can run it using shortcut <Super> + space and type gnome-do in the search area, and hit the Enter to launch GNOME Do.

Gnome Do Window

Then you can start typing. For example you want search for a folder named ‘tecmint‘. Just type ‘tecmint‘ and Gnome-Do will show you the result.

Gnome Do Search Gnome-Do Features Search

When you search ‘tecmint‘ folder above, Gnome-Do also show the location of folder, which is located in ~/Documents/artikel/tecmint. If you press the down arrow key, you will see the more results which fulfill the search keyword you type before.

Gnome Do Search Advance

If the folder have sub folders, you can also press the right arrow key to peek what’s inside it.

Gnome Do Advance Search

To go back to the previous result, press the left arrow key.

Action

From the screenshot above, you see that there is 2 box. The left side is the search result and the right side is the action box. To move between box, you can use Tab button. Same as previous, you can also press the down key arrow to reveal what actions which are provided.

The action which is available will depends on the search result. If your search result is a folder, you may see various actions such as Open, Reveal, Move to, etc. As you can see at the bottom of the screen, there are 11 actions available. This actions will increase if you activate more plugins.

Gnome Do Action

If you are find an application, then the available action is only Run.

Gnome Do Search App Themes

Gnome Do also support themes. You can click the arrow button at the Gnome-Do top right area then choose Preferences and Appearance. There are four themes available. Classic (default), Nouveau, Mini and Glass. Just choose one of them and click Close button to activate.

Gnome Do Theme Shortcut

Still at the preference window, you can choose Keyboard tab to see the available shortcuts. To edit a shortcut, just double-click it and type a new one. To restore a shortcut back to the original, double-click again and press Backspace button.

Gnome Do Keyboard Plugins

Gnome-Do has Official Plugins and Community Plugins. It support various integration to many applications and you can search file and folders on your computer and even allow Gnome-Do to search documents in Dropbox or Google Docs cloud.

Uploading images to ImageShack or Flickr is also supported by Gnome-Do. If you do remote stuff, Gnome-Do can connect to SSH, Putty and NX machines. It also connect with multimedia such as Banshee and Gnome Video Player.

Gnome Do Plugins Conclusion

Gnome-Do may not be the best launcher, but for daily use, it might be help you to save your time.

Gnome Do tool is also available for other Linux distributions in tar.gz format. So you can download the latest source files from the link below and then compile it from source.

1. Gnome-Do Homepage