KDE has an extremely powerful scripted user interface through the use of the dcop utility. You can control virtually any KDE application by entering dcop commands through shell scripts or from the shell itself. These actions can then be tied to menu items, and even hot keys. KDE can also be installed on Ubuntu through the kubuntu-desktop package.

I had asked my friend Caveman a while back if it was possible to select text in any application and do a Google search via a hotkey. He came back 30 minutes later with a solution, which I’m posting for you here.

First, make sure you have the xsel package installed by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install xsel

Now we’ll create a shell script named gsrch.sh and put it in your home folder.

kwrite ~/gsrch.sh

Enter in the following text. Make sure that there isn’t a line break on the second line (and pardon the funky formatting)

#!/bin/bash

dcop `dcopfind -a ‘konqueror-*’` konqueror-mainwindow#1 newTab “http://www.google.com/search?q=`xsel -p -o`&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8″

Now enable execute permissions on the shell script:

chmod u+x ~/gsrch.sh

Now we are ready to add this to an item to the KDE menu. Run kmenuedit to get to the KDE menu editor, and add a new item wherever you feel like:

You can name the item whatever you want, but you will need to browse to the correct path for the command script on your system. Change the work path to be your home directory, and make sure that the “Enable launch feedback” checkbox is Not checked.

Click on the hotkey button in the bottom right hand corner of this window, and set an appropriate hot key. I used Win+G, but you can set it to anything you’d like:

Now we can test it out by selecting text in any window. For instance, I wanted to figure out what this error message means, so I selected the text, and then hit the Win+G hotkey:

And easy as pie, I’ve got a google search window all ready to go:

KDE is just amazing!