As mentioned previously, I’ve been using the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) program as my main launcher for the last little bit. But I’ve taken advantage of this holiday weekend to figure out another program I’ve heard really good things about, and after using it for a couple days, I’ve completely replaced AWN.

The program is GNOME-Do, and it’s a much better fit for the way I work. Graphical menus are indispensable for general use, but I was raised on command line systems, and I still prefer the keyboard over the mouse for a lot of things. Once I know the name of the program I want, having to navigate through menus to find it each and every time I want to start it is irritatingly slow.

GNOME-Do, apparently inspired by the Mac’s Quicksilver program (which I’ve never seen), is called up by a hot-key combination (the Windows key plus the space-bar, by default). When it appears, you just type in a few letters for the item you’re looking for, and it shows you the closest match. If that’s not the one you want, hit the down-arrow and you’ll get a list of the next-closest matches. Once you get the one you’re looking for, the second pane shows the most likely action for it (such as, in the case of a program, “Run”; press Tab to move to that pane, and you’ve got a pull-down menu of other options). Press Enter, the Do window vanishes, and that action is done.

You don’t have to type the first letters of the name either, the program is smart enough to match letters that are within the name, even non-sequential ones. For example, if I type “mssen” (accidentally skipping the first ‘e’), “Pidgin Internet Messenger” is the third item on the pull-down list. Instead of having to go back and correct my mistyping, I can just press the down-arrow a few times to get to the entry I want, and Enter to start it!

And it learns about the way you work, too. If you make that mistake a few more times, it will notice, and start offering Pidgin as the default item when you type “mssen”. Or, if you like, you can explicitly assign “mssen” (or “im”, or anything else you want) as an alias for Pidgin.

Do isn’t just a program launcher, either. Want to quickly open a web page? Type the URL into Do, it’ll automatically recognize it and offer to open it in your web browser. With the Firefox plug-in activated, it will search through your Firefox bookmarks as well. Turn on the “Files and Folders” and “Locate Files” plug-in, and you can type part of the name of a file, and have Do find, copy, move, or delete it, as well as just running it. Want to send an instant message to a particular person, or call them via Skype? Turn on the Pidgin or Skype plug-ins, and Do will recognize the names of your contacts from those programs and let you instantly start a call or IM session with them, or even change your status, without having to open the program separately. Want to play a particular song file you’ve got on your computer? Turn on the Amarok or Rhythmbox plug-ins, and you can start playing it with just a few keystrokes.

I couldn’t figure out the attraction of Do at first, because the version currently in Ubuntu’s repositories (0.4.1, I believe?) isn’t as useful. There’s no configuration panel in it (as there is with 0.5), and apparently many of the things that are optional plug-ins in 0.5 are always active in the earlier version, which can really clutter up the pull-down menu with items that aren’t relevant to you. The Launchpad version, which can easily be installed, is much better.

GNOME-Do is Linux-only, of course (apparently there’s another Linux program called Katapult if you prefer KDE-based solutions, though it’s said that Do will run under KDE as well), but if you’re using Windows, I hear that there’s a free (and also open-source) program called Launchy that does the same thing there. Give one of them a try, you might just find that you like the keyboard better than the mouse too. 🙂