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
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)
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.