Popular launcher applications Do and Kupfer may have some competition – say hello to the incredibly lightweight Alawalk.
Alawalk, the brainchild of a developer named ‘hunterm‘, is a new launcher application made completely in plain bash. This results in Alawalk requiring next-to no other dependencies to run and incredibly lightweight. When running Alawalk consumed less than 70KiB of memory.
Yes, that’s right, KiB!
Extending Alawalk is a simple enough for those savvy enough, plugins can be written solely in bash alone.
The first thing users will note is that Alawalk is not as visually appealing as Kupfer or Do. Appearances are often deceiving for Alawalk is a capable little tool that, providing you set up a keyboard shortcut or place a launcher on your panel/dock, provides a faster way to go about many daily activities.
Installation
Download the latest tar.gz of Alawalk @ alawalk.tk/download
Extract the archive and run the ‘install.sh’ file inside. This will present you with the following window: –
Choose ‘Install’ and hit ‘Ok’. By the time you’ve blinked once or twice the installation will be complete.
You can now use Alawalk.
Usage
Alawalk does not behave exactly the same way as Gnome-Do or Kupfer. For this reason here is a list (plagiarised from the help file in the nifty utility) of Alawalk commands.
- help dialog :h
- terminal dialog :t
- run dialog :r
- manual (also views info pages) page view :m
- run as root :su (uses gksudo)
- computer stats :stats
- uses cat to view stats from /proc/acpi/ files
- can view CPU temperature
- CPU Trip Points
- Battery Info
- Kill program :k
- xkill launcher :xk
- Set variables :e
- Run shell-style commands :sh
- Find and replace text in a file :fr
- Search for files :s
- Downloader :dl
- Head over to System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts.
- In the KS window click ‘add’ and enter ‘alawalk’ as both the name and the command.
- Click OK.
- Find the newly created entry in the list and double click on the ‘disabled’ text in the ‘shortcut’ column.
- Press a keyboard shortcut/combination to invoke Alawalk and then, when happy, click ‘Ok’.
