Introducing Homerun

[Marco Martin]

On Monday 12 November 2012, Nuno Pinheiro wrote:
> On the desktop I positively hate the concept specially in large enough
> screens were moving from A to B might require-me to lift my mouse in order
> to finish the movement...
> 
> I believe much more in non intrusive launchers such as krunner, me notes is
> don't like kickoff all that much. That's as i have pointed out is deeply
> unmarkted by us all and most users wont find out about it being berried
> under an alt-F2.
> I personally believe that that's path kde should take as far as traditional
> mouse/keyboard driven desktop is concerned. Focussing on what "it works"
> for that paradigm making the desktop less and less cluttered and open for
> the apps the user uses with great support for multitasking and integration
> of helpful services.

agree on above points, i'm not sure how much mainstream krunner can be made 
(and yes, it has to be way more visible),
even if the text field would be always visible or anyways easily reachable 
unfortunately a big part of public still needs to browse, don't know exactly 
the psychological reason, but that's what i seen over and over again.

personally i never use kickoff (and i keep it in the panel just because is a 
default applet therefore i muct make sure it continues to work :p) and being 
so for most of the developers ensured it pretty much stagnates.

Also i have serious doubts on those things that attempt to do pretty much 
everything, as kickoff and others are now (just like Emacs, that menu is a 
great operating system, too bad the way to launch applications sucks.. whoops 
;)
the problem is not much the ability to do almost everything, but the attempt 
to put a button for each one of those functions and make it "intuitive" 
(again, krunner solves this just fine)

An idea may be:
* a menu that has the full krunner features (and same runners enabled, may 
require being another process?).
* but by defaults it looks very sparse, just some favorites and a little 
button to browse applications, that's it.
* functions like locations, recently used or leave, still available as buttons 
somewhere (maybe just among favorites) basically it just fills a query in the 
runner field
* so the user even sees what he may write to see that, making those buttons 
useless in the long run (or, saving any search as a "folder")

It would be something that looks way less cluttered than kickoff, but with not 
many regressions.

this is just an idea if anybody is willing to dive into it, personally is 
something on the "to try but very low priority" list. Right now i'm just happy 
with my good old alt+f2 :p

Cheers,
Marco Martin