10. Customize your Catalog

By default, almost all Keypirinha’s features are enabled.

While the majority of users will find convenient not to have to configure Keypirinha straight out of the box, some might prefer to have full control on what is actually available in the Catalog.

At the cost of extra time spent on configuring Keypirinha, reducing the number of items in the Catalog may have a significant impact on both memory footprint and search speed.

This small guide shows how to clear the Catalog entirely so you can then expand it with only the desired features/items.

10.1. Introduction

To understand how to customize your Catalog, you must first understand how it is built. The tiny Overview section gives you an overview of the role plugins play in Keypirinha.

Also, this guide assumes you already know how to configure Keypirinha so you might want to open the Configuration chapter aside and have it handy while reading the following sections.

10.2. Shrinking your Catalog

To start with a clean slate, we will disable every shipped package except the Internal one.

Open Keypirinha’s configuration file and create/modify the ignored_packages setting as follows:

ignored_packages = <All>, -Internal

Read the comments related to ignored_packages in the default configuration file for more info on the meaning and the syntax of this value.

Save your configuration file.

From now on, only items from the Internal package are available. The Internal package enables access to some core features of Keypirinha and is very lightweight in terms of number of items. So it is recommended to keep it enabled but technically-wise, nothing prevents you from disabling it as well (ignored_packages = <All>).

10.3. Expanding your Catalog

Keypirinha is a generic tool that allows a very wide range of use cases.

For that reason, this section cannot be explicit or exhaustive since it entirely depends on how you want to use Keypirinha. For example, some users only want to launch applications while other may want to have full access to every bookmarks referenced in their favorite web browser…

An thing to keep in mind though is that in Keypirinha, each package roughly represents a single feature or a set of related features.
For example, the Calc Package does just what its name implies: it evaluates the mathematical expression you typed, then shows its result(s).

Check out the list of the available Shipped Packages and learn more about their purpose to see if they suit your needs. You may then want to enable them one by one using the ignored_packages setting.

Also, do not forget that some of them are configurable, which means that you may be able to have a more fine-grained control on what they insert in the Catalog.
For example, if you enable the Apps package, you might want to have a look at the scan_start_menu and scan_env_path settings.

10.4. Tracking down unwanted features

If you happen to notice that some unwanted features are still enabled, it is worth mentioning that it is possible to know what plugin (and by extension, what package) created a specific catalog item in the list of results.

To do that, select an item and press Alt+Enter. The Console window will show up and the last log lines list the properties of the selected item. Among them the name of the parent plugin.