Bug 409107

SUMMARY
Often when I need to take screenshots of applications or verify the name of a menu option in English I use LANG=C applicationname.

Typing commands to open applications from the terminal instead of KRunner has two distinct disadvantages: 1) Opening an application from a terminal means opening an application to open another application, unlike Kickoff and KRunner, which are typically already present. 2) Commands (and their corresponding applications) are bound to the terminal, and as such the user needs to either create a new terminal instance for each application or add an & to the end of the command if one doesn't want to keep the terminal open afterwards. KRunner does not have these disadvantages.

It would be fairly convenient and quicker to run commands using environment variables in KRunner.

As for implementation, I think that although not discoverable at all, being able to use environment variables inline (LANG=C applicationname) is very flexible as it would allow to easily and quickly use another environment variable value for each application, whereas being able to set environment variables prior to running commands (similarly to KCron) is pretty discoverable but not as flexible, as it would require going to a specific, dedicated section first in order to change an environment variable, which would be applied to all applications run by KRunner.