Albert is a productivity app inspired by Quicksilver, Alfred and other similar tools, that runs on Linux. Written in C++ / Qt5, this free and open source launcher uses a plugin-based architecture that makes it very flexible and powerful.
Summon Albert with a key combination, say
Ctrl + Space, and use it to run applications, open files, search the web, calculate things, control your music player, search your web browser bookmarks, and much more, using a single interface:
Albert learns what you use the most and prioritizes results, boosting your productivity. Press
TAB to select an item, then hold Alt to reveal extra options (if any):
Hit
Enter to select an item from the list, and Albert will launch / perform that action, and immediately hide its window until the next time you invoke it. See the Using Albert section for more details.Plugins for many common tasks
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| Albert Nerdy theme (QML Box Model) |
The keyboard-driven quick launcher has about 80 built-in themes (using QML Box Model or Widget Box Model as the frontend), and 14 main extensions:
- Application launcher, with options for fuzzy search, use keywords for lookup, ignore OnlyShowIn/NotShowIn and more
- Calculate things
- Search Firefox and Chrome bookmarks
- File search with options like fuzzy matching and mime-types to index
- Hash generator
- MPRIS control which allows controlling MPRIS-capable media players like Rhythmbox, VLC, and more
- Secure Shell extension which makes your ssh hosts accessible by Albert
- The Snippets extension allows storing text snippets and looking them up by their title (like a trigger)
- System operations (lock, logout, suspend, restart or shut down)
- Using the Terminal extension you can run commands in a terminal or shell directly
- WebSearch allows searching Google, DuckDuckGo, YouTube, GitHub, Wikipedia and more (and you can add custom search engines) from Albert
- A Python extension that makes it possible to easily extend Albert using Python scripts/extensions (there was also an "External Extensions" addon, but it was deprecated with Albert 0.14.0)
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| Albert showing the clipboard history from CopyQ (can also search the clipboard history) |
Even without any extra extensions Albert would be quite useful. But thanks to its Python extensions, Albert can do a lot more.