Like many who have used Launchy, Gnome-Do, QuickSilver, or even the Windows 7 Start Menu search to quickly & easily find programs, I now have a hard time using any computer, even my n900 without that ability. Instead of tons of program shortcuts on the desktop or digging through the menus I assigned app-search-app a global shortcut key.

As a bonus this also provides a way to set up other global shortcut keys, which for frequently run programs or scripts could really be a speed boost. This is all done without using a modified hildon desktop, which means we can stay with the CSSU updates too.

Here's the basics of how that is done.

Download and install app-search-app


Download xbindkeys zip file & extract to MyDocs

Make a permanent home for xbindkeys exe (use terminal for following commands)
Create or modify a .xbindkeysrc text file in leafpad or other editor as desired.
Note: Mod5 is the function (blue arrow key)
There are good resources online for what can be put in the file, here are examples of key combinations to toggle fullscreen (Ctrl + Space) and to bring up the app-search-app (Function + Left arrow). On the n900 version with 4 arrow keys there is nothing assigned to them with the Function key, so they are prime candidates to use for this.
.xbindkeysrc
Put it in /home/usr & be sure permissions are correct:
You can start xbindkeys manually from the terminal as user by typing:
Or if you want xbindkeys to start automatically each time the phone is turned on you will need the following upstart file put in /etc/event.d

xbindkeys startup file:
Hope someone else finds this as useful as i do. Even though Catorise makes the menus much better than standard, this is still much faster to access things.