KDE's "Start" Menu

[blackbelt_jones]

You have a lot of options!

There's the the new menu

the "classic" menu,

and now, there a new, third launcher that comes with KDE 4.2 called lancelot. Lancelot aims to be comprehensive, the one place where you go to launch everything. Like the other two menus, it's available as a widget.

Also, there's still an application menu available through Konqueror, and you can open that in Dolphin, too if you like.

But the fastest way to open applications is with the keyboard. They're really enhanced the RUN APPLICATIONS dialogue,

plus, with 4.2, the've finally got the "action inputs" dialogue working, thereby enabling infinite keyboard shortcuts.

However, I wonder if everybody understands that Konqueror and Dolphin both enable you to add custom links (with custom icons) to applications and locations anywhere with in the file system. I don't think I ever really understood this myself until I started fooling around with folderview in KDE 4.1. You can make Konqueror/Dolphin into a custom menu. Or several custom menus. You can combine files and custom icon links any way you like. I'm pretty sure nautilus can't do this. The best part for me is that I can use my custom Konqueror/Dolphin menus with a Window manager like fluxbox or fvwm-crystal. So it's not only a custom menu, it's a universal menu that can be accessed from any Desktop Environment or Window manager

... but if you use the KDE4 Desktop, folderview really shows off this feature to its best advantage. Folderview is a widget that mounts any folder to the desktop in a clickable window. The folder becomes the clickable desktop, same as always, but now, you can put any folder in the window, so you can change the Desktop gui, according to different tasks and different situations. The adjustable desktop GUI is one of the reasons KDE4 is a lot more than eye candy. It's also brain food!

screenshot: Using Konqueror as Desktop menu for Fluxbox
http://i546.photobucket.com/albums/h...shots/ks27.png