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Install Synapse in Ubuntu, A Fully Featured Application Launcher for Linux

Synapse is an advanced, beautiful looking and easy to use application launcher for Gnome desktop (now fully supports Kwin too). Although we have other competitors such as Gnome-Do for instance, but still Synapse uses less system resources thus resulting quicker responding times which is one of the reasons of its popularity.

The new GUI

It comes with the very beautiful looking (3D and all that geeky stuff! ;-) ) GUI and lets you easily search for apps or recently used commands with ease as well. Even if you're not sure of the command that is supposed to launch an app, Synapse has the ability to guess and "reveal" it you (which is actually nothing new... even the standard Gnome 2+ launcher has that anyway).

A screenshot of the old GUI... still looking sexy :)

Not only applications and their commands but Synapse lets you even search for recently opened items via its GUI as well. For instance, if you want to quickly access one of the audio tracks that you recently played, then you can click on the "Audio" tab and search for that.

Although it has been a while since it was first introduced by the developer, but few days ago a new version is available which is 0.2.6 (at the moment) which brigs few major changes to the both GUI and the function it self such as ...

*. All new... even better looking Skin.

*. Click-able categories.

*. Mouse-scroll support for the app-list.

*. Drag and drop (now you can drag and drop apps directly from Synapse to other windows).

*. Stay on top of the windows by default.

*. KWin - KDE window manager support. 

*. Loads faster than the predecessors....

So, if you use Ubuntu and wondering how to install it on your PC... then open your Terminal and issue the below command (using a PPA channel).

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:synapse-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install synapse

2 comments:

Dom said...

I have the latest version installed and love it (installed after googling and finding this article, thanks!).

I have a question though; I do not see a dark skin. The nearest I have to the skin in your screenshot is the 'Do-ish' theme. This theme appears bright orange to me. Did you do anything to get the dark look?

TIA

Dominic

Gayan said...

@Dom,

Hi,

You are welcome :).

Well, this is the daily build PPA for Synapse and I haven't installed it recently and the screenshots are actually taken from the developer's site at the time I was writing this post (I do post my own screenshots though, most of the time :D).

So perhaps this is a new theme with a new version...

Some "updates" can be found in the below link (although they're few months old) and if you have suggestions, perhaps you might wanna drop a comment to the developer :). Good luck.

http://codingyourdreams.net/2011/05/05/synapse-0-2-8-is-coming-slowly-but-faster/

btw, you're a ColdFusion developer!. Nice :)

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