Apps and media on LineXinBar: music, videos, pictures and files

Every application

Everything you have installed is on the bar, grouped the way Plasma's launcher groups it: System, Multimedia, Graphics, Internet, Office, Games, Software, Development, Education & Science, Utilities and Other.

A category with nothing in it is not shown. Software gathers the stores and software hubs, and Settings — the shell's own column — is always there. You choose which column the bar opens on under Settings › System › Startup category; it is Games unless you say otherwise.

An application can even ask for its icon to be drawn in the shell's own material, as a bead of water like the shell's marks, by naming lxb among its keywords — which is how the sibling applications sit on the bar as if they had always been part of it.

Search everything

Start typing on the start screen and the bar looks everywhere at once. The category row closes up into a single button called Search, and the column under it narrows with every letter.

It finds applications — even by what they do, so "browser" finds a browser that is not called one — every game in every library, every console game on your shelves, the games in Trophies, and every page of Settings however deep it is. The line under each result says where it lives.

Pressing a result does what it would in its own column: a game or a program starts, and a place — a page of Settings, a shelf — puts the search away and takes you there. Esc or B gives the search up and the bar spreads back out exactly where you were.

Music

Every song anywhere in your home folder, listed on one shelf under Multimedia, with the folder it came from written under its name.

The shelves keep themselves up to date — a file you copy in turns up, a file you delete goes away — and stepping into one never waits for the disk. With SongOnSole installed, the Music shelf opens a music library and player built in the shell's own style.

Videos

Every film under your home folder, each on a card showing a frame of it, fitted to its own shape so nothing is cropped.

A film opens in the player you have already chosen for it — or pick another from the menu, and that choice holds everywhere, in your file manager and browser too. Videonsole is a film player made for the bar, and a video a browser pops out into picture-in-picture floats over whatever you open next.

Pictures

Your photographs as a column of thumbnails — portrait pictures stay portrait — under Graphics.

A screenshot you take while standing in Pictures appears in the column a moment later. Imagonsole opens them in a viewer you can drive with a pad, zoom and all, and any picture can become your wallpaper.

Files

The disk itself, as the same tree of columns the rest of the bar is made of: a folder is a column you step into, a file is a row, and the trail behind the cursor is the path.

It opens on your Home folder, the whole disk from Root, and a row for every drive. Y on a file raises its menu:

• Open and Open with — and choosing an application there makes it the default, everywhere.
• Copy and Move carry the file through a mirrored bar to where it should go, with Paste at the head of every folder.
• Rename, Compress into the kind of archive you pick, and Trash — the same trash your other file managers use.
• Pressing an archive offers Extract here or Choose a folder, and never overwrites anything already there.

Drives

A drive nothing has mounted is on the list anyway, reading Not mounted · 932 GiB. Press it and it is mounted and opened.

USB sticks and cards mount the moment they are plugged in, the way GNOME and KDE behave. A disk inside the machine asks for an administrator's password first, on the shell's own panel. Safely remove on a stick's menu unmounts everything on it and tells you when it can be pulled out.

Whether a disk is mounted every time the machine starts is a switch under Settings › Storage — the shell writes the system's own setting for it, so it holds whichever desktop you use.

Android apps

If you use Waydroid, the Android applications it can run have a column of their own, with Waydroid's own launcher at its head.

Waydroid's entries declare no category the other columns understand, so without this they would all fall into Other. Entries Waydroid marks as hidden stay hidden here too.