Termlaunch

This is a very WIP project that allows you to launch your desktop applications through a terminal emulator. It is designed with the worst developer practices.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8fbf3679-7065-43a9-8809-ce434fd53846

Limitations

• If you have not configured a terminal emulator, it will try to use kitty as default.
• At some point, i would like to add support for prefixing the launch command with some like sudo, prime-run, uwsm, etc by adding a list of prefixes in the config file.

Installation

Using precompiled binaries

From the releases section, you can download the latest release available.

The binaries and packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures. If you are using a different architecture, you should build it from source or use the cargo installation method.

With your package manager

You can install them using your package manager. Download the package for your architecture (x86_64 or aarch64 are available) and install it using your package manager:

# Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives
sudo apt install ./termlaunch_<version>_Linux_<arch>.deb

# Arch
sudo pacman -U ./termlaunch_<version>_Linux_<arch>.pkg.tar.zst

# Fedora - Also should works for other RPM-based distros
sudo dnf install ./termlaunch_<version>_Linux_<arch>.rpm

# Alpine
sudo apk add ./termlaunch_<version>_Linux_<arch>.apk

Manually

Download the tar.gz file for your architecture and extract it. You can use the following command:

tar -xvf termlaunch_<version>_Linux_<arch>.tar.gz

Make sure to replace <version> and <arch> with the version and architecture you downloaded.

Also, make sure to give the binary executable permissions:

chmod +x /path/to/termlaunch

You can move it to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin to make it available system-wide:

sudo mv /path/to/termlaunch /usr/bin/termlaunch

Or you can run it directly from the extracted folder:

/path/to/termlaunch/termlaunch

Note: The binary is statically linked, so it should work without any additional dependencies. If you have issues, please open an issue in the repository.

Using cargo

You can install it using cargo, the Rust package manager. You can install it with the following command:

cargo install termlaunch

Or you can follow the latest commit in the repository:

cargo install --git https://github.com/amaterasu-uwu-xd/termlaunch

Make sure you have $HOME/.cargo/bin in your $PATH.

Building from source

If you want to build it from source, you can clone the repository and build it using cargo. Make sure you have Rust and Cargo installed. You can install them using rustup. Requires 1.85.0 or higher.

cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/amaterasu-uwu-xd/termlaunch
cd termlaunch
# Make sure you have Rust and Cargo installed, if not, you can install it using rustup
cargo build --release

This will create a binary in target/release/. You can copy it to your $PATH or run it directly from the build folder.

Integration with WM

The integration is very simple, you just need to add a keybinding to your window manager. Optionally, you can add some window rules.

This is an example for Hyprland:

# This bind uses $terminal as the terminal emulator, if you want to use another, you can replace it with your preferred terminal.
bind = Alt, Space, exec $terminal --class termlaunch -e /path/to/termlaunch

# Window rules
windowrule = float, class:(termlaunch)
windowrule = size 50% 50%, class:(termlaunch)
windowrule = stayfocused, class:(termlaunch)

And for Niri:

window-rule {
    match app-id="termlaunch"
    open-floating true
    default-column-width { proportion 0.5; }
    default-window-height { proportion 0.5; }
}

binds {
    Alt+Space { spawn: "kitty" "--class" "termlaunch" "-e" "/path/to/termlaunch"; }
}

Configuration

The configuration file is located in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/termlaunch/config.toml or $HOME/.config/termlaunch/config.toml. You can also use the --config flag to specify a different configuration file.

Example configuration

icon_theme = "Papirus-Dark"
terminal = "kitty"

# Lot of colors
[appearance]
search_input = "#f9e2af"
search_border = "#cba6f7"
text = "#f2cdcd"
subtext = "#f5e0dc"
help_text = "#ff5555"
selected_app = "#74c7ec"
selected_app_text = "#11111b"
applications_border = "#a6e3a1"
icon_border = "#55eebb"
info_border = "#89dceb"
actions_border = "#89b4fa"
help_border = "#000000"