If you’re using Linux with Gnome, do a mouseover the music file and you’ll start hearing the song immediately.

You don’t even need to double-click to open the file in a media player, not even a mouse click is needed. Nice little hidden secrets of an awesome desktop file manager.

Gnome Do is very similar to the Windows-only app Launchy, but much more powerful. If you’re using Gnome on your Linux distro it may worth trying out Gnome Do to help speed up your productivity.

Although not a new application, I was hesitant to use Gnome Do just to avoid having another service running in the background sucking my computer’s resources. But, after trying it out the 40MB of RAM it uses on my machine is surely worth it.

After Gnome Do has started I can activate it by pressing the Windows Key + Space Bar. Then, I can do a lot with it such as:

• Open a program

• Find an album and start playing it

• Run a command

• Or even open a file, rename it, move it to another folder, search the web, start an email, and many many other things.

Its full functionalities are achieved through its plug-ins you can easily install. On your Linux distro most likely you’ll be able to find Gnome Do in the repositories, in Ubuntu for example it is already in Synaptic along with a nice set of plug-ins.

Enjoy the productivity boost!