I love these tools on my Pyra

[Eight Bit]

It might be that the Linux guru's among us aren't interested in either of these but I figured some of the regular users like myself will like this tools to use on their Pyra.

1. Guake terminal (With the hotkey set to the USR1 button)
This opens up a terminal in a convenient overlay. Multiple tabs can be opened, the terminal screen can be split and can also be set to be slightly transparent so stuff in windows underneath can still be read. I found that opening and closing the terminal with a single dedicated button is awesomely great!
It can be installed with sudo apt install guake

2. Plank
This is a Mac style icon dock/launcher that can show icons of programs you regularly use. I have set my task bar etc to the top of the screen and plank on the bottom. The icons increase in size when hoovering over them with the mouse pointer, just like on a mac.
It can be installed with sudo apt install plank

3. Albert (With the hotkey set to F12)
This nifty program was also available on the Pandora. It was a pain for me to compile because of all the dependencies but in the end I managed. (except for the muparser calculator plugin, that doesn't seem to work)
It's a launcher/file/web searcher. Pressing F12 shows a text field and it automatically shows a number of search results of the text you've entered.
Albert can be found here https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert
It needs a load of QT5 libs and stuff and I had to google all of them to find out which QT5blablabla-dev I had to install for it to compile correctly. muparser for the calculator plugin needs to be installed separately before make or make will fail. muparser did install fine for me but enabling the calculator plugin in Albert crashes the program... No biggie... I guess I'll launch a calculator separately instead of entering a calculation in Albert

Please share any tools in this thread that you like to use

 

[elw3]

Wow you found the features of enlightenment without installing enlightenment.

 

[Eight Bit]

I had to google that...
So Enlightenment is another window manager... I now wonder which is slimmer, faster, better...

Not gonna try

 

[elw3]

Enlightenment is superior for this kind of device, ppl who checked out my old bodhi image for pandora may understand what i mean.
It is mainly targeted at power users who want to solve problems fast.
The launcher for example learns based on your actions and bakes in a usage memory.
Eg i have hexchat sitting on the x button, used to be xchat and my muscle memory claimed it still is starting with an x and i corrected it once and it saved hexchat there instead.
Browser is just enter, f is file manager, etc.
So basically just like albert.
But the whole wm is based on the principle. say i want the mouse middle click to be enter when a certain window is in focus, this is a hard task in a common wm, but E just lets you select use cases.

Here if i want to remove all closing buttons from every window i can just do it here. (Why would i tho?)

Spoiler

And the very screenshot, made, cropped and uploaded with a button press, all inbuild.

 

[levi]

1. I use xfce4-terminal for that myself, but perhaps that's where they got the idea from.
2. I have shortcuts for all of the programs I need to start daily in my static panel settings
3. I've always find bash's tab completion to perform all I need myself.

But it's cool you've found other ways to do the same sort of stuff I do.

 

[Eight Bit]

1. I use xfce4-terminal for that myself, but perhaps that's where they got the idea from.
2. I have shortcuts for all of the programs I need to start daily in my static panel settings
3. I've always find bash's tab completion to perform all I need myself.

But it's cool you've found other ways to do the same sort of stuff I do.

Is there a drawer function in the xfce terminal that can show and hide the window with a single button press? I really like the convenience and slickness of the guake terminal in that regard, I won't have to alt tab between windows or anything with that.
And yes, of course applications can be started with regular icons on the desktop or panel but I like the less spartanic slickness of plank.
Comparing Albert with tab in bash is a different story in my opinion. That would be a little like comparing apples with pears as Albert has a way broader use case. It also finds and launches dbp's for instance.
Try my suggested tools though, I'd be interested in your findings in regard to ease of use and aesthetics.

 

[levi]

Is there a drawer function in the xfce terminal that can show and hide the window with a single button press? I really like the convenience and slickness of the guake terminal in that regard, I won't have to alt tab between windows or anything with that.

Yes, it's called the xfce-terminal dropdown. I press Insert (because it's not normally a key I use for anything else) and it pops up in the top right of the screen.

Comparing Albert with tab in bash is a different story in my opinion. That would be a little like comparing apples with pears as Albert has a way broader use case. It also finds and launches dbp's for instance.
Try my suggested tools though, I'd be interested in your findings in regard to ease of use and aesthetics.

I've built and installed albert now on my Arch machine. I already have bits of qt5 installed for keepnotexc, but I needed to install qt5-declarative and qt5-charts but then it built fine with only a handful of deprecation warnings. I quite like the calculator on it (that works for me), that saves me from spawning a python instance and using that. Other than that it doesn't seem to do much that I can't do with the right terminal invocations though, although it is currently indexing my computer so I'll see if it does more after that.

I couldn't get guake installed. Not sure why but even after I purged my var cache of installed packages it still wanted more space than I had there.

 

[docbroke]

There are terminal emulators similar to guake (drop down terminals), e.g., tilda, yakuake. I like tilda for it's lightweight build.
Linux is mainly about choices, in window manager/docks/panels etc. So it will be fun for everyone to find things they like and use them.
I have created few simple scripts to help me find commands/files/bookmarks etc. Mostly these are based on keyboard shortcuts. To share an example of my keyboard shortcuts based workflow, I am sharing this sample video.

Window manager I am using is "cwm". The menu like thing is a script using "rofi". I search and open file using my own script, based on fzf, which a wonderful tool. Terminal is terminator. There are no minimize/maximize/close buttons as all this is done using keyboard shortcuts. Bar on the bottom is conky, with stalonetray to provide systemtray. Calendar on the screen in "remind" displayed using "conky".

 

[Eight Bit]

@levi super nice! I guess I should have spent more time investigating the settings and options of the xfce terminal
Albert also does web and/or youtube searches and such, and there's all sorts of plugins that can be run in it. I guess with the right amount of effort all of that can be done in other ways but I'm to noob for that I think

@docbroke
That looks good Doc, are you gonna do that the same way on your Pyra? I'll check out some of the suggested terminals. Thanks!

I also tried i3 wm for a bit but I think I don't grasp it well enough as I ran into some limitations/stuff that didn't work quite right so I switched back to plasma on my pbp and mate on my desktop.

 

[levi]

There are terminal emulators similar to guake (drop down terminals), e.g., tilda, yakuake. I like tilda for it's lightweight build.

tilda is nice. I just installed it and unlike more established terminal emulators I wasn't able to break it using unicode characters. Apparently it's allergic to wayland, but while I'm not using that for other reasons, I'll spend a little more time playing with it.

 

[docbroke]

[USER=80531]@docbroke
That looks good Doc, are you gonna do that the same way on your Pyra? I'll check out some of the suggested terminals. Thanks!

I also tried i3 wm for a bit but I think I don't grasp it well enough as I ran into some limitations/stuff that didn't work quite right so I switched back to plasma on my pbp and mate on my desktop.

I have been using this setup for sometime, and will try to do the same on pyra.

I have some suggestion for searching and opening files in terminal. I am using scripts similar to below in the video.
for example to quickly change directory you can have function defined in your .bashrc like

cdf() {
cd $(find . -type d | fzf --border --reverse --height 10 --prompt "Change Directory: ")
}

or to open files using default xdg-open

of() {
xdg-open "$(find . -type f | fzf --border --reverse --height 10 --prompt "Open File : ")"
}

You can create as many functions as you like replacing xdg-open with commands of your choice. This only needs fzf installed. For another example to open file using your default editor ( which may be vim/nano etc.)

ed() {
$EDITOR "$(find . -type f | fzf --border --reverse --height 10 --prompt "Edit File : ")"
}

Script I am using in video to openfile is at https://github.com/Docbroke/opener and https://github.com/Docbroke/run

 

[matzesu]

Im quite basic on my Pyra, i have Firefox, Thunderbirth, the only custamacion i made was the widgeds in the taskbar, : Weather, CPU Speed, i downloaded some special Software like Blender and Gimp, but just to show on Video, maybe i have to look at blender again as far as i have vacations to learn how to use..

 

[Bosbeetle]

I like to open the terminal on the pyra by pushing the start and ctrl button simultaniously didnt know it was the shortcut but it feels like one button on the pyra... just a thumb in the middle...

 

[matzesu]

You could also use Pyra Button + Right Lower Shoulderbutton if i remember correclty

 

[netcat]

My zaurus runs snes9x and mplayer directly in a tty. No X11. I believe it's largely due to SDL. Will Pyra be able to do this?

 

[levi]

I've built and installed albert now on my Arch machine. I already have bits of qt5 installed for keepnotexc, but I needed to install qt5-declarative and qt5-charts but then it built fine with only a handful of deprecation warnings. I quite like the calculator on it (that works for me), that saves me from spawning a python instance and using that. Other than that it doesn't seem to do much that I can't do with the right terminal invocations though, although it is currently indexing my computer so I'll see if it does more after that.

I've given up on running Albert now. It kept hogging my CPU at inopportune times when it regularly decided to index my home directory again. Maybe I could disable the plugin that's doing that, but if I did it would be almost useless to me. I wasn't using any internet features because I like to limit my attack surface, so in practice it only found some sid files I'd forgotten about, and was a calculator.