fragility

Last night, after a tweet by Levi I decided to give another try to Tilda. In case you never heard about it, Tilda is a pulldown quake like terminal for Gnome, which would be something just great for me.

I had tried Tilda some months ago, but it was totally bug ridden and it didn’t respect Gnome’s HIG in terms of keyboard shortcuts (like changing tabs). After I posted this as bug report, it’s main developer seems to have liked the idea and changed it on the latest version. However there’s still one really annoying bug which, according to Tilda’s page is known:

Note: Apparently Metacity has started to not be very Tilda friendly by having focus stealing prevention on by default. Feel free to let me know if you have problems with Metacity but also let their developers know.

Right. So why does Yakuake (which is exactly the same app for KDE and has existed for a while longer) works so well with Gnome itself ?

I decided to stick with Yakuake for a while and try to get used to it. However, the stupid default keyboard shortcuts (for tab management) still annoy me and I can’t understand why it refuses to accept the same shortcuts I use in Gnome apps if i customize it that way (and no, they’re not KDE shortcuts for other actions).

One other little app I’ve been using a lot is Gnome Do. It’s just simple and perfect and eliminated most of my usage of the Deskbar Applet, which lately would be just for Tracker Live Search. However, Tracker seems to be having some problems as well. It used to work well but now it just can’t seem to find anything I want (even if the file name is all lower case and has been resting in my home directory for weeks). So that’s another app that it’s making it’s way out of my Gnome default session.

As for Glipper, it’s great to know that it was finally turned into a Gnome applet, but for some reason it keeps crashing on start. I’m using Hardy Heron, so I’m not really surprised about this.

With yesterday’s launch of Google Desktop for GNU/Linux, I decided to take a look at the desktop search options again. I tried Beagle on the past, but I always found it too slow and ram consuming, and it never seemed to index stuff right. So here’s my new comparison of three desktop search options for GNU/Linux. If you know about any other options, I’d really like to know about it.

Beagle

I hate it. It’s still slow as hell, eats up a lot of ram, takes a long time to index stuff the first time (but it’s not intrusive because it only indexes while the processor is idle) and even when used together with deskbar it’s somehow stupid, because you have to type in the result, select the “search with beagle” option and wait for the beagle application to open and search it for you. I have to admit that I didn’t even let it index everything before I uninstalled it. Some guys I know would say “oh…it’s Mono !”. I’m not really an anti-Mono fanboy (I love Tomboy) but I don’t think Mono is the kind of platform which should be used to develop this kind of app (at least, not the daemon). But then again, what do I know ?

Tracker

Extremely fast indexing stuff on the first time, but in order to be that fast it uses your processor a lot, which can become intrusive, so you’d better have it index your stuff over night on the first time. Has a low ram consumption, it’s fast, and has a great integration with deskbar (gives you live results within deskbar, just like spotlight on the mac).
By the way, thanks a lot to Filipe Carvalho for writing about it. I had heard about Tracker before, but completely forgot its name, and I didn’t try it at the time because the project was still very young.

Google Desktop

Looks good and it’s easy to setup. Takes a long time on the first index (but like Beagle it’s not intrusive). The keyboard shortcut (hitting Ctrl twice) is not configurable and can become quite annoying, specially if you’re a keyboard shortcut freak like me. I use Ctrl+Alt+Directional Keys for desktop change, and sometimes Google Desktop just comes up unexpectedly. Also, the fact that it only shows a few results and in order to see more you need it to open a browser page, is not very practical.

Considering these three options, my favorite is undoubtedly Tracker. It’s fast, light and has a perfect integration with my Gnome desktop.

Update:
Looks like there’s a way to integrate live Beagle searches into deskbar as well (thanks to those who pointed that out on the comments). That’s not the biggest hassle I have with Beagle anyway, so I’ll still keep Tracker. Other thing I noticed and forgot to mention: Tracker eats less disk space than Google Desktop.

Well…there’s not much to notice. Seriously. Some users might notice huge differences, but i don’t. At the desktop and application level, everything is mostly the same. Only small things here and there, like those bulleted lists on Tomboy. The only issue with that is the huge space between each list item (Come on ! This is a note taking application, not an office one). Oh, and is it just me, or Deskbar Applet seems a lot faster ?

Other users might notice bigger differences in laptop related issues, but although I’m using a laptop myself i won’t notice any of that due to the fact that my laptop sucks.

I’m still trying to understand why the hell they left the new control center out of the default options. I find it great. If you’d like to enable it, just right click the System menu button and click on Edit Menus. Then go to the Preferences section, activate Control Center and deactivate everything else.

I’m also gonna give another go at Beryl, but I’m not really in the mood right now to go through all those configuration menus.