First of all, I didn’t run Albert for real since Gentoo still hasn’t had dev-qt/qtcore:5 stabilized, 4.8.5 is the currently stable version. Well, even it had, I wouldn’t jumped onto Qt5 yet.

https://cdn.rawgit.com/ManuelSchneid3r/albert/master/v0.6.gif

Version 0.6 GIF by the author

Once again, I saw this good looking fellow on Arch Linux forums, the author’s post claimed the following features:

  • Run applications
  • Open files
  • Open bookmarks in chromium
  • Calculate math expressions
  • Search web for things
  • Fuzzy search
  • Modify the actions taken by pressing the modifier keys
  • Customize look and feel with different styles (or by writing your own qstylesheets)

Among these, the calculation is the only one that really amaze me, even though I normally wouldn’t take a second look at a program launcher like this, well, rich. Too many stuff that I don’t need. For all what I am looking for a program launcher is, simply, running the program I ask. That’s why I am still using old bashrun 0.16.1 four years later, even after I switched to dwm, I keep it.

Nevertheless, if you have Qt5 and you happen to need a launcher, Albert might work for you. It’s written in C++ by Manuel Schneider under GPL (according to the PKGBUILD), currently version 0.6.