GnomeTWEAK

If you spend long enough sitting at a Linux box, you’re bound to stumble across some previously unknown trick that’s useful in your everyday use. It doesn’t even matter if it accomplishes the task you set out to do. If the trick is useful and you can remember how to access it, it’ll save you time, nonetheless.
It’s really an example of the old saying that sometimes “it’s better to be lucky than good.” Today’s Tweak is just such a trick - one that I discovered completely by accident and have used often since.

I often log into a console window on a different tty. You can achieve this with the Ctrl+Alt+F1 key combination. (Actually, you can use any function key from 1-6. The F7 key is normally reserved for the current X Window session.) Even though it’s pretty and often useful, sometimes the GUI interface actually adds time and keystrokes to a task rather than subtracting them. In fact, I often have a terminal running in the background on another tty just for this reason.

So, I’m coding away one day and decided to log into a terminal. I used the Ctrl+Alt+F2 key combination. However, I didn’t quite depress the Ctrl key hard enough to send a signal. The computer only saw Alt+F2. What happened? A GUI “Run Command” window popped up in KDE. “Well,” I thought, “this is cool.” And, as important as coolness is functionality. The Run Command window in KDE is, indeed, very functional.

Aside from running a single command in a GUI window, the Run Command window offers additional options. You can run the command in a terminal or as a different user. If you choose “root” from the list of users, you can enter the root password in a text box within the window. You can set the command priority and even schedule the command execution for a later time. All in all, it’s a bit quicker way to execute commands from within the desktop environment than even opening a virtual terminal.

See — sometimes these things just happen when you’re focused on learning and using Linux as your primary OS.