Use a Mac-style launcher with Slingscold on Ubuntu

How are you guys good day, this time lIt is I will show how to install Slingscold in our system. For those who do not know I will tell you that Slingscold is an application launcher written in Vala using GTK which emulates the Mac OS X launcher.

This launcher supports any desktop environment, you can use it in Unity, Gnome, Gnome Classic, Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE, Cairo Dock session, Phanteon and LXDE.

This launcher is not found directly in the Ubuntu repositories so we must add a third-party repository to our system, we will use the NoobsLab repository where maintain various transformation packages to give the appearance of MacOS to our system.

This time we will only use Slingscold but if you are interested you can verify that other packages are the ones that the repository has to make the appearance of your system more personalized.

 How to install Slingscold on Ubuntu 17.10?

As I mentioned, we must add the repository to our system with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/macbuntu

We update the repositories:

sudo apt update

And finally we install the launcher with:

sudo apt install slingscold

Note: I have tested this repository in Ubuntu 14.04 and it works, so in later versions it will work without problems.

How to use Slingscold?

To start using this launcher we will have to look for it in our application menu, but because this process is really absurd, since we use our menu to search for an application launcher it does not make sense.

What we are going to do is create a shortcut using a combination of keys In order to run our launcher, for this we go to System Settings> Keyboard> Shortcuts> click the Add button

This is where we are going to define our key combination, an example can be launched with ctrl + alt + m, the advice is to avoid any combination of keys that already exists for some system task.

And ready with it, we already have our launcher configured.