Comment by deafpolygon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deafpolygon | Hacker News Reader

Eh..?

Don't get me wrong - if it works for you or OP, great! Keep doing it. I use Sway and KDE depending on what tickles my fancy.

For application launching, I just use Alt+Space and type the first few letters of what I want. My frequent flyers get assigned to Meta+Alt+Letter.

- Krunner / Rofi - Alt+Space (Meta+D was a bit contorted for me) - Meta+Enter - Konsole (KDE) / Kitty (Sway) - Meta+Shift+<1-0> - move active window to desktop - Meta+1-0 - switch to desktop #1-#10

A lot of apps use F-keys so it's not a good fit for me. When possible, I like to map custom shortcuts for various applications using F-keys.. not use it as an application launcher.

For example: With Dolphin, I've gotten used to F2 for renaming (Windows holdover), F3 for split file view, F4 for terminal, F5 for refresh

Kate or VS Code, I tend to map F5 to Build/Run/Debug.

He does cover this briefly: "Is it up to an app launcher such as Spotlight or Alfred?"

I'd be curious as to why he finds the F keys faster. Perhaps not having to wait for the bar to appear, not having to "context switch" by thinking about the app's name and not having to type anything.

He talks about how one key is his music software for example, so by simply remembering F6 it skips having to even know what the app's name is and having to potentialy pick the second of third choice of a list. "[alt space] spotif... oh damn, no [backspace] it's itun... wait no I just switched to Tidal... [backspace] So [T] [enter] oops, I just opened the Terminal..."

And I respect that. But, krunner and rofi is instant for me. I guess I don't really switch between apps that much for this context switching to be a problem.

> I'd be curious as to why he finds the F keys faster.

Simply because it's a single key press, even no modifier is needed. So, yeah, it's faster and less thinking.

How do you deal with the loss of F-key functionality by applications that use it?

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