plasma search in application launcher?

[Kristian Rink]

Hi Duncan;

thanks a bunch for your response and taking the time writing such an 
in-depth explanation. Greatly appreciated. :) I'm still in the process 
of getting used to KDE Plasma and, so, also learning how these things 
fit together and how they are named, so hope you pardon me messing up a 
few terminologies here. ;)


On 9/20/18 9:04 AM, Duncan wrote:
> 
> It's not entirely clear from your description, but I /believe/ what
> you're referring to here is krunner, the beefed-up "run dialog" that does
> so much more these days.
>

Yes, as far as I learnt by now, this is indeed krunner. It has an 
*impressive* feature set for sure, and I'm just slowly adopting its full 
potential for my day-to-day workflows. Started using KDE once again 
after spending most of my FLOSS life on GNOME or XFCE, I really quickly 
managed to make myself feel comfortable with the environment except for 
that one use case missing, in the Application Launcher (kicker):

When searching for an application in there (like Firefox, konsole, 
Thunderbird, ...), I'd like to be able to switch to an active instance 
of these applications if there are any, rather than starting a new one. 
krunner can do that apparently (and much more). The other way 'round 
however, krunner apparently doesn't offer a way to lock screen or 
shutdown the system; otherwise I'd completely give up on the start menu 
and just use krunner. But maybe there are still better ways to set all 
this up. Still learning. ;)

Actually I filed a feature request (I hope) for that, here:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=398859

Let's see what happens...

> 
> As for that wide array of search sources... krunner has a search-plugin
> architecture just as plasma-shell has its plasmoid-widget plugin
> architecture, with all sorts of runner/search plugins available to search
> the various sources (running windows/desktops/activities, web shortcuts,
> various indexed-file results from the semantic-desktop index components
> that I don't have installed here and thus don't get, units converter, all
> sorts of stuff!).
> 

Yeah this is pretty amazing. Currently and very cautiously looking into 
that, I wonder how much effort hacking in custom search providers would 
be, even though my language skills (mostly Java, a bit of Python) 
possibly won't suffice for that... :) Still an interesting new playground...

Thanks again and all the best;
Kristian