"Well, those inconveniences are now a thing of the past thanks
to an awesome little application and its plugins. Inspired from Mac
OS' Spotlight feature, GNOME Do will let you do almost anything
using just your keyboard. And, despite its name, GNOME Do will work
just as well on other popular desktop environments too.
"The main chore that you'll want to be handled via the GNOME Do
is opening applications. Summon it with Super (or Windows Logo
key)+Space, type a few letters and in a blink of an eye it will
start guessing the program you want to launch. And not only does it
guess but it can also learn. Let's say you want to open
Thunderbird; you start typing the first two letters and it will
guess that you want to start the theme manager. Type a few more
letters and you'll eventually get to Thunderbird. Well, here comes
the learning ability. The next time you summon GNOME Do, it will
remember that you wanted Thunderbird the first time so its main
suggestion will be Thunderbird based on the same two letters. Cool!
And, if there are more applications or actions with similar names
you can press the down key and get a drop-down window with all the
suggested applications so you can choose from there."