 Personally, I like keyboard-driven run launchers. I like to launch my applications, as well as search for files or whatever it happens to be. I like doing all of that on the keyboard. I much prefer that kind of workflow over the traditional mouse point and click menu system where you have to navigate some complicated menu system through various categories to finally find the app that you actually want to launch. No, no, no. If I already know the name of the program, I just type two or three letters on my keyboard, hit enter, and boom, my program opens up. That's why I love programs like D-Menu and Rofi, which I've done videos about those run launchers, many videos about D-Menu, especially in the past. Here lately, I've been experimenting with using Emacs as a run launcher. Yes, that is an Emacs buffer there as a run launcher. But recently, I came across this new run launcher that I had never heard of, and I've been playing around with it for about three or four days now, and this run launcher is called Cerebro. Before I show you Cerebro in action, I do want to just briefly mention their website, Cerebroapp.com, and you can see you've got a download link for Windows, Mac, and Linux. That's right, it is Cross Platform, which is a big bonus for this kind of application because many people do work on multiple computers running multiple operating systems. A lot of you guys that run Linux, for example, as your daily driver, also have Windows computers that you have to work on. Wouldn't it be great to actually have the same kind of workflow on both systems? So that is a real positive here for Cerebro. If I go to their GitHub page and look at the licensing, it is free and open source software, licensed under the MIT license. You can see it's written mostly in JavaScript with some CSS, right? So we're talking about Electron here. Matter of fact, in the commit messages, I see several mentions of Electron and React, so based on Electron and React. And if you're wondering about how frequent the development is, I see commits from about four months ago, which was the last release. They have a release version 0.11.0, that is the latest from February 8th of this year. And you know, Cerebro, out of the box, it has a key binding. You can change the key binding, but if you leave it as little thought, control space on your keyboard launches Cerebro. And from here, you can just start typing something. For example, if I want to search for Alacrity, you know, I can search through the menu system and launch the Alacrity terminal from Cerebro. Control space brings it back up. Now, one of the things, if I just start typing, like AL, for example, I get several programs on my system that are installed that have the string AL. Well, you'll notice I could also search for files for AL. If I did that, I get a preview window here of some of the files on my system that contain the string AL. So you can kind of use it as a file search. Also, I get Wikipedia searches. Now, I actually added the Wikipedia plugin because Cerebro, one of the cool things with Cerebro, it has a really cool plugin system. Let me escape. Now, when you launch Cerebro, it actually launches and stays here in the Cistray. You can see I've got this icon, toggle Cerebro, just toggles the run launcher, but you would probably just use the key binding for that. But you also have things like plugin and preferences. So if I go to plugins, you can see it actually just automatically fills in a string for you, plugins. So you actually don't even need to go here to search for the plugins that are available. You could just launch Cerebro with control space and type the word plugins to get you to the same place. And then you can see these here are the installed plugins. Most of these are installed by default. I did add the Wikipedia plugin. And how you add a plugin that's not installed, you can see there's available plugins and there's a bunch of, I guess, available third-party plugins you could add, for example, DuckDuckGoSupport, ShellSupport. That would be interesting. Execute any shell command from the search line. Let's do that. Let's hit the install link there. And assuming that worked, let me hit escape. So now I'm gonna hit control space to relaunch Cerebro. And I had to look up some documentation to figure out how to use the shell commands. Apparently all you need to do is add a dollar sign. That kinda makes sense, right? Dollar sign that signifies typically a standard user prompt, like in a standard fast shell, for example. And now I could type any shell command I want. For example, I'm gonna launch Alacrity and inside Alacrity I wanna launch Htop, in this case. And you can see it launched the Alacrity terminal with Htop running. So very cool. So it can be your desktop applications, such as maybe I wanna play a game of ZeroAD or another great free and open source game I have installed on this computer, Sourbrotting. So we can do all of that if I wanna do a web search, of course. I mean, I could search, let's search for DistroTube. I can search for DistroTube on DuckDuckGo or on Google, I have both the plugins here. So if I wanted to, let's search for DistroTube on DuckDuckGo. It launched on a separate window here, but I have no idea. Yeah, DuckDuckGo's search results are so, so bad, right? Well, it's one of the really bad things about DuckDuckGo. It is really just a horrible search engine. I much prefer the Brave Search. Or honestly, I'd probably just rather use Google search rather than DuckDuckGo. Yes, DuckDuckGo is so bad I'd rather use Google. So that's mainly it with Sourbrot. Not much to it. I mean, there's a lot of extra functionality, you know, a lot of plugins that you could add. Of course, you can customize it a little bit. One of the things we didn't talk about other than the plugin system, if I go back to the SysTrade icon, there is preferences as well. So, or you could just type Sourbrot Settings. And if you go into the Sourbrot Settings, you could change the hotkey. I was just leaving it as the default control space. But if you wanted to change that to something else, you could do that. Control space, though, works for me at least because it really doesn't conflict. For example, you're tiling window managers and even standard desktop environments typically use the super key. So I wouldn't involve the super key in this at all. The alt key could work in some combination or form, although if you're using a text editor like Emacs, for example, it makes heavy use of both control and alt. So, you know, control space, though, that's such a weird combination of keys. That I haven't found a conflict with any other program using control space. You also have themes. I think by default, it does ship with the light theme on. So it's a white window. I actually chose to use the dark theme. And of course, you can specify your location as well. That's needed for geolocation services, probably for some of the online plugins that you could enable. You also have settings for a proxy and you also have some checkboxes here for example, open at login. So do you want it to auto start? I have that ticked on. So every time I log in to, in this case, I'm using Xmode and add as the window manager today, it automatically launches and sits in my sys tray. So it's there waiting for me. As far as the placement of the window, sometimes the placement of the window gets a little funny like the window can move around on you. If I do control space now, you can see it's not in the center of the screen where you want is because I moved it. So typically if it's not in the place where you want it, for example, in a tiling window manager like Xmode add or Qtile or DWM or whatever it is you happen to be using, just put it where you expect it to be the next time and hit escape and then control space. And then, you know, it should appear in the correct location the next time. So that is the Cerebro run launcher, the Cerebro app, a very cool application that I wanted to share with you guys. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Gabe, James, Matt, Paul, Role, Wes, Armoredragon, Commander, Ingrid, George, Lee, Methos, Nate, Erie, Yon, Paul, peace, auction for the world, reality, surrealist, red-profit, Roland, Solastry, Tools, Devler, Wards, N2, and Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-eared patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick episode about the Cerebro run launcher, it wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I depend on you guys, the community, if you like my work. I wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. These guys. Yes, it's Electron, but it's a really neat app.