Mercury: Eee's answer to Mac's Quicksilver (and Windows' Launchy)

This is what I love about the Open Source community... they see a need and they do something about it and share it.  This is exactly what happened when a few Mac users bought their own Eee PC.  They missed a nifty Mac application called Quicksilver.  they talked about it and someone took action by coding a program that somehow worked similarly and dubbed it "Mercury" (Quicksilver... Mercury... get the drift?).



Well, its not much to look at in its present form but the author (eeeuser.com's MD81544) will release the code of this baby as GPL so the Open Source community may continue to improve on it.

Anyway, here's where Mercury got announced to the world and here's here it can be downloaded.

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HOWTO: Use Google Desktop as a Quick Application Launcher (like QuickSilver)

As a Mac user, one of my most frequenty used application is a useful program called Quicksilver. Using QuickSilver, I can launch applications simply by typing the first few characters of the program I wish to run. This is what I sorely miss when I started using the Eee PC as my "light" alternative to my MacBook. I have searched the web for a Linux alternative but the ones I saw were a bit too clunky for my taste. One alternative (Katapult) updates a lot of base Linux files that it rendered some poor soul's Eee PC inoperable.



Then I sort of discovered Google Desktop for Linux. I installed Google Desktop as an exercise of my Linux command line skills but I uncovered a feature in it that sort of mimics some of the functions of QuickSilver.



By configuring Google Desktop to respond to the key combination Ctrl-Shift, Google Desktop will open a "Quick Search Box" and by typing the program I want to run on that search box I can scroll down to my desired application and run it without having to go through Eee's "start" menu!

Using this, Google Desktop filled my need to quickly launch applications a-la QuickSilver and it should suffice for my needs now.

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