Launcher

This is my quick and dirty fzf based keyboard application launcher, dashboard, and window switcher. It was designed to work with the niri wayland compositor.

Features:

• Fuzzy finding applications and launching them
• Customization of dashboard commands, like network management, bluetooth, or a system monitor. Anything goes that has a shell or a TUI
• Status in the launcher instead of a seperate bar, (eg: volume, battery, backlight or keyboard language)
• Window switching in niri

Normal mode:

Dashboard mode:

Window mode:

Requirements:

• niri, window switching and keyboard language display depend on the niri compositor and use niri msg
• alacritty, alacritty is used as the terminal emulator and is started by start.py with the launcher running (you could use another terminal emulator, but you will need to change start.py)
• pactl, for displaying the volume
• python-psutil, for showing battery information in the header bar
• fzf, for the whole program to even work
• nerdfont, to display the icons in the status bar correctly
• fish, this is the shell for which this was written. it is probably possible to port to other shells, but I did not have the time up until now.

How to use:

• Add the following rule to your niri config file:

  window-rule {
  	match title="alacritty launcher"
  	open-focused true
  	open-floating true
  }
  

• Add a binding somewhere in your niri config to start the python start.py
• Customize the entries in your dashboard using ~/.config/launcher.json it should look this way:

[
	{
		"name": "name of the entry",
     		"exec": "command to execute"
   	}
]

• The launcher starts in normal mode. You can switch to dashboard mode by selecting the entry :d, using :w will switch you to window mode
• In any mode you can exit the launcher :q or return to normal mode with :n.
• Pressing Esc selecting a entry in normal or window mode or defocusing the window will close it

How it works

• In normal mode .desktop files will be parsed from all of the usual locations, their name will be displayed, when selected the binary defined in their Exec field will be executed
• In window mode the launcher will get all open windows using niri msg windows and will switch to the selected one with niri msg action focus-window --id <id>
• In dashboard mode your entries will be parsed and the exec field of the selected one will be executed. You should either use a TUI or a shell in your exec field.

Installation

On most distros you will be able to use the launcher by just cloning the repo and then running the start.py file

On NixOS this should work too, but you can also use home-manager. You can just import the two files into home-manager. You can configure the dashboard using launcher.nix, a few entries will already be included by default. Then just rebuild your home. This will use the nix branch which already has some things set up to work with NixOS.