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shellex - Shell-based launcher

shellex is supposed to be a dmenu-style launcher with a lot more features and a lot simpler design. It launches a shell (currently zsh) and shows it in a small terminal, wrapping every command with a little bit of extra magic (redirecting stdout, stderr, disowning and closing the shell) to get more typical launcher-behaviour.

This gives you a simple launcher with tab-completion and other shell-features, configurable in shell.

See this video for a short demonstration and comparison to another app starter: demo

I tried to do this a few years back, then using C and implementing the terminal-operations myself. This turned out to be a very bad idea, it made the design overly complex and the state I left it in had regular segfaults and was far from working. After not much seem to happen in that direction, I decided to start again, this time using urxvt to do the terminal-part, which turned out to be really easy.

While this had the label “early prototype”, it has worked in daily use quite reasonably. A few possible improvements were never apparently important enough to invest serious amounts of time and work into them. Still, contributions are welcome.

Architecture

shellex has three parts:

(Planned) Features

Working:

  • Launching Applications (yay)
  • Commandline parameters
  • Basic Tab-completion
  • Starting on the right output (configurable, either the output containing the currently focused window or the output containing the mousepointer)
  • Dynamic resizing of the launcher-window e.g. for multiple lines of suggestions for tab-completions (see doc/autoresize.txt)

Planned, but not implemented:

  • Buffering/showing some output, for errors etc. We have to think about some magic way to determine, whether output is helpful or the launcher should be hidden immediately
  • dmenu-like completion, typing part of a command still completing (maybe zsh has something to do that? possibly fzf)
  • .desktop-file integration
  • Your ticket here

Installation

There are packages in

If you are on one of these distributions, we encourage you to install shellex via your package manager.

Else, or if you want to help developing, just do

$ git clone git://github.com/Merovius/shellex.git
$ cd shellex
$ make
$ make install

for installing in $(HOME)/.local

$ git clone git://github.com/Merovius/shellex.git
$ cd shellex
$ PREFIX=$HOME/.local make
$ PREFIX=$HOME/.local make install

Usage

After installing shellex you probably want to bind it to a shortcut - most likely Alt+F2. How to do this depends on your desktop environment and/or window manager.

xbindkeys

If you're running xbindkeys, the entry for your ~/.xbindkeysrc file might look like:

"shellex"
    alt + c:68

i3

i3 shortcuts can be modified as described in the official documentation.

bindsym Mod1+F2 exec shellex

Contributing

shellex is a very young project, it would highly profit from your help. The following is a not comprehensive list of highly appreciated ways to contribute:

  1. Test it and make tickets for any problems you stumble upon or ideas you have to make it better.
  2. Have a look at a list of issues and find one to fix. But please announce your intention to fix it, so that we can be sure that it will be merged and there is no duplication of effort.
  3. Have a look at the list of packaged dirstributions. If your favourite distribution is not on it, please package it. Please announce your intent to do so (in a ticket) and treat it as at least a mid-term commitment to maintain the package.
  4. Customize shellex in self-contained, side-effect free config-snippets and add them - if you consider them useful to more then just yourself - in a pull-request to the conf-dir.
  5. Contribute comments and documentation. Consider translating the manpage. Again, please announce your intention and again, if you translate to a language, that none of the core-developers speak (currently everything but English and German) please consider it to be at least a mid-term commitment to maintain the translation.

Customizations

Users are invited to publish their customizations. Either as a contribution (see above) if these are changes that are a sensible default for all users, or in their own small packages which contain only the customizations. Especially, when the customization will be useful for many, but not all users.

Existing customization projects are:

Configuration

Configuration of shellex has two parts: The first one are X-resources. Additionally to the urxvt-class, instances run by shellex will also look for the shellex-class. This makes it possible to customize the appearance of shellex without interfering with your usual terminals.

There are also two additional resources defined by shellex:

Resource Values Default Description
shellex.pos pointer｜focus focus If pointer, shellex shows the window on the window, the mousepointer is on, else it uses the output, where most of the currently focused window is (falling back to the pointer-method, if the root-window is focused).
shellex.edge bottom｜top top On what screenedge to show shellex

On start, shellex assembles a list of snippet basenames by looking at all of the paths listed below. For each snippet basename, shellex loads the first file it finds when looking through the paths in order:

  1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.shellex. Typically unset, defaulting to $HOME/.config/shellex.
  2. $HOME/.shellex
  3. /etc/shellex (shellex defaults, symlinks to /usr/shellex/conf/)

To customize shellex, you can do the following things in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.shellex or $HOME/.shellex/:

  1. Overwrite a default by creating a new snippet of the same name
  2. Not include a default by creating a symlink to /dev/null of the same same
  3. Include an example-snippet not used by default, by creating a symlink to /usr/shellex/snippet
  4. Write you own snippets with a currently unused name

To avoid naming-conflicts in the future, you should add a common suffix to all your own snippets. Snippets are run in ascending order. By choosing a number which sorts between/after the existing snippet(s) you can ensure it runs at the desired time. E.g. if your snippet beeps on errors, name it 15-errorbeep so that it sorts before 20-nobeep.

Command-line

All command-line parameters given to shellex are passed directly to urxvt, so if you want to change colors or font, you can do it through the appropriate urxvt-parameters (or by using resources, for persistent configuration). For example, to get a dark grey background with a slightly yellow font you might start shellex with

$ shellex -bg grey15 -fg linen