remove albert

[jonchun]

albert is currently unmaintained and seems to bug out at times. While I think the albert interface is much more spotlight-like, the "Application Dashboard" widget actually provides a much closer experience to the original spotlight and updates much quicker. Want to just remove albert from the original install and replace it with application dashboard.

Ctrl+space should open application dashboard instead.

[jonchun]

Disabled albert install, but still need to look into how to map application dashboard to control+space

[jonchun]

I've noticed that the application dashboard widget can sometimes be a little slow to pop up. Might have to look for (yet another) alternative. Maybe just k-runner?

[AuthFailed]

Could ulauncher be a good alternative?

[jonchun]

Could ulauncher be a good alternative?

I've looked at ulauncher and from light usage I don't think it felt very good to use at all. The styling felt really lacking and everything felt cramped in the UI. Additionally, the plugin/extension download area seemed to be unvetted and a bunch of the ones I tried didn't work.

Maybe just k-runner?

After light usage, I don't think this will work either. Krunner is also slow to pop up sometimes compared to albert/gnome search. Will continue investigating. Perhaps I just go back to albert after all and hope the issues get fixed.

[RedBearAK]

Albert has so far been the least-worst stand-in for Spotlight that I've found. I don't recommend removing it unless you can come up with something better. I haven't really been that impressed so far with Ulauncher.

One major problem I've discovered is that due to some oddness in the code Ulauncher literally CANNOT be activated with physical Alt+Tab (logical Ctrl+Tab), at least when using Kinto to do keyboard shortcut remapping. This basically makes Ulauncher useless for me when I'm trying to simulate the Spotlight experience of launching with the physical equivalent of Cmd+Tab.

On the other hand, once I get rid of the interfering keyboard shortcuts in any particular desktop environment (like XFCE or MATE) I have always been able to activate Albert with the Alt+Tab key combo while using Kinto.

Everything else like Cerebro seems to be even worse off in terms of active development than Albert.

[jonchun]

@RedBearAK Point taken. Back when I was actively working on this project, that was definitely the primary reason behind using Albert. I think further dev might have happened on Albert as well to fix some of the bugs so that would definitely give it bonus points in my book.