Kupfer Pandora's Box 1 Released, Finally Adds The Famous Quicksilver "Comma Trick" And Global Hotkeys [Ubuntu .deb Download]

Kupfer Pandora's Box 1 had been released. We haven't talked about Kupfer on Web Upd8 so I would like to introduce Kupfer first.

Kupfer is an alternative to Gnome DO, which will remind you of Quicksilver for Mac (if you used a Mac). In fact, even Kupfer developers say it's heavily inspired by Quicksilver.

But what does Kupfer do? Well, you ca use it to summon an application or document quickly by typing the first parts of its name. It can also do more than getting at something quickly: there are different plugins for accessing more objects and running custom commands.


Kupfer Pandora's Box 1 finally introduces some of the advanced features found Quicksilver such as commands with many objects and global hotkeys to any custom command.

Let's take a look at the important changes in Kupfer version Pandora's Box 1:

• Implement the famous "comma trick": Press , (comma) in the first or third pane to make a stack of objects to perform actions on. This allows actions on many objects and even many-to-many actions.
• New plugin: Triggers: Add global keybindings to any command you can perform in Kupfer.
• New plugin Skype
  
• New plugin Thunderbird (or Icedove)
  
• Implement merging of contacts and hosts: All contacts of the same name are merged into one object.
  
• New plugin Higher-order Actions to work with saved commands as objects
• The Favorites plugin was reimplemented: you may favorite (almost) any object. Favorites get a star and a rank boost.
• Window List plugin was improved, most notably a Frontmost Window proxy object was added
• New proxy object Last Command
• The Firefox plugin now includes most-visited sites from browser history
• The list of plugins has a field to allow filtering the list
• New Czech localization
• Many smaller changes.

I especially like Kupfer for not using Mono and because it uses less memory than Gnome DO. One of the important things I take into consideration when deciding to use an application is how active it's development is, and Kupfer is great at this too being under very active development, with the previous version being released just a month ago (in fact there were 2 versions released in December alone). The HUGE list of plugins is also nice and basically those should be enough to cover almost anyone's preferences for different applications:

Download and install Kupfer Ubuntu .deb

Kupfer is not yet available in its PPA, but I've created (I'm starting to like this! =) ) Ubuntu .deb files and uploaded them to the Web Upd8 PPA. Update: Kupfer is now available in it's official PPA so add the PPA first:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kupfer-team/ppa

And install it:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kupfer

Once installed, you will find Kupfer under Applications > Accessories.


Read more about Kupfer Pandora's Box 1 and download source packages: HERE. Also, you can find a lot of Kupfer tips @ live.gnome.org