LinLog

Today, inspired by the little productivity tips from yesterday, I took another look at Katapult. If you've not heard of it, it's a little hotkey-based application launcher for KDE that comes pre-installed with Kubuntu. However, as I discovered, it can do more than just run applications.

The basic idea behind Katapult is simple. It runs in the background, waiting for you to press a hotkey combination. When you do, it pops up a pretty little window that catches keystrokes and matches what you type against the installed programs. When it finds the one you want, you hit enter and it runs.

There you have it. Simple, efficient...and not particularly useful. At least, I didn't used to think so, because you can only enter programs with a .desktop file, not arbitrary command lines. It's kind of handy when you don't feel like typing a full executalble name, but what's the big deal?

Well, it turns out that Katapult does more than just launch programs. It does a number of other handy things as well. For instance, you can use it as a calculator. Just type in numbers and arithmetic symbols instead of letters. Hit enter and the resulting equation gets copied to the clipboard. Neat!

It also can act as a spell checker. For that, you type a pre-configured keyword and then the word you want to spell check. This is actually an insanely useful feature. I often find myself firing up a word processor or opening a browser tab and heading to dictionary.com just to I can check the spelling of a single word. With this feature, I can do it with just a few keystrokes rather than switching applications.

And there's even more goodness to talk about. Katapult can search for bookmarks to open, it can search for file names in your documents folder, and it can even find audio tracks if you have Amarok running. In reality, it's not so much an application launcher as it is a generic "quick-launcher" for just about anything.

The only problem I've found so far is that all these cool features are not immediately obvious. After all, that's why I was so uninspired by Katapult initially - because I thought it just ran applications. It just took a quick visit to the website and a perusal of the configuration options to figure out just how cool it is. Now that I know, I think I'm going to be using it all the time. Kudos to the Katapult guys!