Surpassing Quicksilver

A few weeks ago, I was looking at the list of programs running on my computer, and contemplating the memory they were using (when I had no apps open) and the percentage of them whose purpose I actually understood. I then decided I'd had enough. So I ditched Ubuntu, installed Gentoo, and set it up to run plain X windows with just a window manager. (I'm overjoyed with the results.)

One program I used to use was Gnome-Do, a somewhat weak clone of the excellent Quicksilver program for the Mac. The thing I really liked about it was I could push Windows+Space and start typing the name of a file on my computer, and it would suggest matches as I type so I could open the file. This is much faster than browsing through your filesystem, if you can remember any part of the filename. But I was ticked off that it used 40MB of memory when I wasn't using it. So I wrote a trio of scripts to do essentially that same thing, which you can get here.

The crux of my script is a really, really great program called dmenu. dmenu is a menu that lets you choose one of many (often thousands) of options by typing parts of the options, and it narrows down your choices as you type. It's way better than even Quicksilver. All it does is take the list of options in standard input, lets the user choose one, then prints the option chosen to standard output. So it can be used to do all kinds of Quicksilver-like things (I happen to mostly only care about being able to open files easily).