Some newbie Krunner questions:

1. If I search for a term and one of the hits is a piece of KMail mail, clicking on it displays an empty reply form in KMail. I don't want that. I want the actual mail message to display. How does that work?

2. KRunner does not seem to understand "~". For example, entering "ls ~/Dropbox" and then telling it to run in a terminal results in this: "/bin/ls: cannot access ~/Dropbox: No such file or directory".

I'm trying to decide between using Recoll or Nepomunk for desktop search. I need full text searching of files. I don't need to reveal semantic connections between bits of data or to leverage any of the capabilities supported in the Kontact apps, save mail search. Comments and advise welcomed.

The full text search can be achieved with kioslave nepomuk search described here:

http://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk/kioslaves/search

eg. kioclient exec 'nepomuksearch:/kde.org' in krunner will brink up a dolphin window with all of my kde.org related emails.

Make sure you have default email application set. System-settings->default applications.

~ does not work for me either. Bug? Feature? Someone else will need to answer this.

This is because ~ is merely shorthand for your home directory - your shell expands it for you. This works in some places within KDE as well, where paths are expected, because special handling exists to substitute ~ for your home directory there.

It doesn't work in this case as when you tell KRunner to open "ls ~/Dropbox" in a terminal it does exactly that - without using a shell interpreter in between. This results in "ls" being given the literal argument "~/Dropbox" - which of course doesn't exist.

The examples here (http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner) use ~ and show it functioning in KRunner.

As previously stated - it recognises it in certain very limited circumstances such as when it is a known file path. It doesn't work for executing commands directly as KRunner does not attempt to perform any expansion for the contents of that command.

I don't intend to belabor this, but perhaps the examples shown are inaccurate, or unclear. If I enter a simple command with '~', -- one example shown there is 'ls ~/Documents' -- and tell Krunner to show the results in a terminal, a terminal is opened and the error message displayed. If the intent of the guidance there is that a user should use Krunner to first open a terminal and then run the command, it isn't stated explicitly. If '~' will be interpreted correctly in limited circumstances, those are left unexplained.

In any case, that is a secondary issue. The mail search and display issue is more concerning: Clicking on an email found in Krunner opens a blank KMail window with the email linked as an attachment. What I almost always want to do is read the email, not reply to it. (And if I was replying, I'd want to see the contents of the message, too.) Dolphin, on its part, seems unable to search for mail.

I am leaning to using Recoll for my purposes rather than Akonadi/Nepomuk, if for no other reason than Recoll's GUI interface is more convenient and capable than Krunner or Dolphin. (It's annoying that Krunner vanishes after each use. Search queries often need to be modified and repeated.)

Mine shows in view mode.

System Settings ->File Associations -> type .eml in the search bar then expand message, select rfc822 and make sure KMail view is listed at the top, if not then add it / move up.