Complicated?

I use Yakuake for almost everything in Ubuntu. Simply press F12 and down comes the terminal. If you combine it with zsh, you'll have more fun, be more productive, and do stuff a lot faster than with a mouse. You can navigate folders way faster with the use of aliases. If you have zsh installed ("sudo aptitude install zsh" in ubuntu), simply edit the .zshrc file located in your home directory to do this open up a terminal and type "nano ~/.zshrc" then add your aliases anywhere in the file preferably on a new line.

Say your videos folder is "/home/user/Videos/Movies/" to make an alias to put you into that directory with one word, you'd add this to your .zshrc file: alias movies="cd /home/user/Videos/Movies/" 

including the quotes, remember to substitute your username. Note that if any of your folder names have upper-case characters you'll need to enter them accordingly. Add as many aliases as you want; some examples can be found here in the section titled 'Advanced .zshrc'. Then try them out for the above you'd just type 'movies' and it would take you to the directory you specified in the alias. Jump for more.


Here is a link to a sample .zshrc file. And here you can find a plethora of common and not-so-common linux commands.

Once you get used to those, it's time to start using them for practical things. Like launching web-browsers, and watching videos. All without touching the mouse.

Depending on which video player you've made nice with, you'll need a different command to watch a video with it. If you have mplayer, first cd to the directory where your movies are, then do "mplayer somefile.avi &!" Hint: the &! isn't needed but it disconnects the process from your terminal freeing it up for some more keyboarding.