Write your own application launcher
TL;DR: It’s easy to write an application launcher fit for your exact needs. You can take my hacky code on Github as a starting point.
The application launcher (Alt+F2 or Meta+R) is the program I run the most on my desktop because it’s the entry point for most everything else I want to run. A while back, I switched from XFCE to KDE too see what things were like having not used KDE since pre-Plasma. I was shocked by the latency in nearly everything: lag to launch system settings, lag to launch even the application launcher (krunner)! Having to wait 400ms after hitting Meta+R before I can start typing is inexcusable for something that should be very simple. I don’t need a fancy start menu that lists my favorite programs. I don’t need it to search over the contents of my files. There are really only a few things that I need it to do:
Your list of necessary launcher tasks is probably different! I looked around a bit and didn’t find something that had this exact feature set, although some certainly could do everything on this list and a lot more. Krunner, for example, has a plug-in system to do things like dictionary lookups, stock price lookup, etc.
