 So my next long-term review is going to be MX Linux, and that should be released sometime in the next week. Over the last month of my time using MX, I've been using KDE Plasma as my primary environment, the place where I spent most of my time. And it's been a long time since I've used a desktop environment. Most of the time, over the last two years or so, I've been in a tiling window manager of some kind or another, whether it's DWMI3, BSPWM, whatever. And I still love tiling window managers and I still plan to daily drive one. But over the last month, I wanted to use an experience for MX that would be similar to what most people would use, whether they use the XFC version or the KDE version. So I've spent most of my time in KDE Plasma. And during that time, I've learned several things. One of the things that I've learned is that K-Runner is really, really good. If you don't know what K-Runner is, K-Runner is basically the spotlight search of KDE. Now if you don't know what spotlight search is, I don't know if I can really help you there. That's the Apple version of K-Runner. It's a hard to define thing. But basically what it does is it allows you via keyboard shortcut or some other way of bringing up a search box, either at the top or the middle of your screen, that allows you to do many different things. Mostly search. Primarily used for searching the web, searching through your documents and files, searching for applications, searching through your repositories and stuff like that. It's a search tool. But the thing that makes K-Runner so good is that there's just a ton of other stuff that it can do. So what I'm going to do today is take you through a few awesome things that K-Runner can do that you might not know about. So let's go ahead and jump in. Okay, so first of all, let's just take a look at what K-Runner looks like. So you can actually bring up K-Runner by default using the alt key and space bar. And this is what K-Runner looks like. Now, like I said, it might appear at the top for you. I've changed it so it appears in the middle, but it really doesn't matter where it appears. It functions the same. So the one thing you'll notice is that it's just a blank search box. So you're wondering what can you do about it? What can you do with it? Well, the first thing that I found that is really quite cool is that let's just say you wanted to add something together. So let's just... You don't have access to a calculator and you don't want to launch the calculator. You wanted to get something really quickly. So let's just say you wanted to know what 2 plus 2 equals. So you just do equals 2 plus 2 and it will give you the result of that arithmetic. Obviously everybody knows 2 plus 2 is 7. It is 7, right? No. It's 4, right? It says right there. I knew that. Anyways, that was dumb. And it's not just addition or subtraction or division that you can do. You can do things like square roots if you want to do SQRT and then in parentheses you would do let's just say the square root of 4 and then in parentheses it's going to tell you that the square root of 4 is 2. You can do things like that. You can also do things like this. You can do equals solve and then parentheses 2x plus 3 equals 4 and it will tell you exactly what the output of that equation would be. So it also does algebra. It does a ton of other more complicated things too. You can go through and do differentiations. You can do things like several things that would have to do with calculus and stuff like that. A lot of those things, stuff is way beyond me. I'm getting close to being 10 years out of university. I don't remember any of that math stuff. They tell you you're going to use it in real life and unless you're like a computer programmer you're probably never going to use calculus or an engineer I suppose. But the point is, is that K-Runner will allow you to go through and do a ton of stuff like that and it means you don't actually have to open up the calculator. You can just go through an alt space, do something like that and it will show you the outcome. So the next thing on the list is that let's just say you don't know how to spell something. Now this is something that happens to me a lot. I don't know how to spell words sometimes because they just... You ever have a situation where you're writing down a word and it just looks weird? You think it's spelled right, like you know it's spelled right but it just looks odd. And that happens to me a lot. Some words are just spelled weird. Sometimes you don't know how to spell words but with K-Runner you can actually go through and check spelling. So let's just say I wanted to figure out how to spell the word verbose. It's just a random word that popped in my head. So we do spell and we know it starts with a V and there's a B-O-S-E in there. And then it just tells us how it's spelled, V-E-R-B-O-S-E, right? And you can do that with any word you want, just say G-L-E. So Google is here if you wanted to do, you know, search for something like that. It gives you hints at which it thinks you're trying to spell by using the spell keyword. Now you can also go through and check definitions. Let's just say we wanted to define the word verbose because it would define verbose. We've just learned how to spell it and then it gives us the definition of verbose. Now, one thing I have not figured out how to do is figure out how to make it so that it actually displays the entire, I actually didn't know that. You can actually go through and just hover over and it'll tell you the whole definition of things, how it doesn't show it. So that's cool. I'm learning something new here too. So you can go through and define words that are in the dictionary. Now the one thing you should know about these two features is that in order to use the spell check functionality, you have to enable it. So in order to do that, bring up Krunner, hit the settings icon here, scroll down to where you see spell checker and turn it on. By default, it's off. So it would be like this and then you'd want to hit the checkbox and then hit apply. Otherwise it just won't work. So you just have to turn it on. Why it's not on by default, I don't know. It seems to be the only one in that list of stuff that Krunner does that is off by default. Not sure why they've done that. So that is spell check and define words. So the next thing on the list is unit and currency conversions. So oftentimes you need to know how many ounces are in a cup or how many ounces are in a gallon or how many centimeters are in a meter or something. I don't know how that would be pretty stupid. But the idea is that you can go through and get those conversions. So let's just say we type in one cup and it will tell you that there are 0.41 pints in a cup. There's 0.236 liters in a cup and so on and so forth. Pretty much any unit conversion Krunner can do right on the fly. You no longer have to go to Google in order to find those conversions. It does the same thing for currency. So let's just say we type in one US dollar and it tells us how many euros, Canadian dollars, pounds, sterling and yen are in one dollar. So that's really cool. So if you're trying to figure out how much money you need to go on a trip or something and you want to do that kind of conversion, you can do so using Krunner without having to go through and use some kind of converter online. It will also tell you the time. Now everybody knows that there's a time clock down in the lower right hand side. But if you want to know what save time it was in, let's just say, I don't know, Tokyo, it'll tell you what time it is in Tokyo. If you want to know what time it is in Moscow, it'll tell you what time it is in Moscow. And that's pretty cool, right? It tells you exactly what time it is right now in certain places around the world. The next one on the list is pretty cool. If you're on a laptop, one of the things you do probably quite often is change the screen brightness based on what environment you're in, especially if you're on Linux where the automatic screen brightness sensor might not work. So let's just say you wanted to change the screen brightness. You get into Krunner, you do screen brightness. And then the percentage of screen brightness that you want. So let's just say 10, and then you hit enter and it would change the screen brightness to 10%. That's really cool. Again, and especially if you're on a laptop where you want to have minute control of how your screen brightness is, and you don't happen to have a widget down there in the taskbar to change the screen brightness. Okay, so the last one on the list is something that we will probably only use if an application actually goes through and freezes or something. So for the most part, when you want to close a window, you can just use the X button up here at the top, or you can use a key binding if you want to use a key binding, whatever. If your program is frozen, you can't do what you do on a Windows machine control alt delete. It really doesn't do anything on Linux for the most part. And in the situation where it does something, it may not do what you actually want it to do. So if you want to kill a program, the best way to do that is using something like htop or using xkill or pkill in the terminal, but you can also use krunner. So if you do open up krunner and you type in kill, in this case dolphin, you can go through and kill dolphin. Now don't just hit enter on this because it won't work. For whatever reason, krunner doesn't sort these things in the proper way. I mean, I just like it for the bottom one here to be at the top. But you want to do the terminate applications one, you hit that and dolphin will quit. It will also work for other things. So we open up this and do kill and then discord. You can go through and search for the discord process that you want to kill. Now we see we have multiple discord processes here. Which one is frozen? You won't really actually know. But if you just hit that, it'll actually close discord. In this case, it did actually kill discord. It gets a little bit fuzzy when you're dealing with something like a browser, which has just a ton of processes. And you don't know which one you'll kill that needs to be killed in order to actually kill the whole program. So it gets a little fuzzy. You may end up having to use something like htop or something like that if you want to kill something that is running multiple processes. But for ones that are only using a couple processes or just one process, killing via krunner is actually pretty cool. So that is it for this video. Now there's a ton of other stuff that krunner can do. I highly recommend going into the settings for krunner, which I showed you how to do earlier, and navigating through some of the stuff there that it shows you that you can do. The problem with doing that is that it doesn't actually tell you how to do a lot of stuff. So for example, there is a web search functionality in krunner that you can use. You can go through and use certain keywords in order to search different search engines. So you can do Google, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, things like that. But it doesn't tell you the syntax of how to use it. The documentation there is not all that great. In the same thing for several of the other tools, the documentation there, at least inside the app, isn't that great. I'm sure that it exists online someplace. I didn't search that out. But just know that once you've found something in there that you can do, you'll probably have to discover the syntax to go along with it in some other place. So that is krunner. I find this tool really awesome. I still kind of prefer Rofi, but I'm more used to the building my own config kind of stuff and writing my own scripts and stuff like that for that. And that's not something you can really do as easily with krunner, although maybe you can. Maybe there are plugins that allow you to run your own scripts or something like that. I'm not actually sure. I've never tried. But I'm still used to Rofi. But krunner is a great alternative if you're going to use plasma and you don't want to have Rofi running as well. So that is it for this video. If you have comments on krunner, you can leave those in the comment section below. You if you have other comments, you can leave those down there as well. Make sure you hit the like and subscribe button. 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