A Linux Program Launcher

This is a Program Launcher written in Rust. For the moment it uses multiple different UI toolkits, namely: - [x] egui - [ ] iced

Why multiple UI toolkits?

I started using egui for this, which is a great toolkit, but it has some limitations. So I thought I'd try some other toolkits. This I think is a reasonably simple UI, but with some quirks (like the keyboard scrolling) which I can use to compare ease of use and feature sets.

Why another program launcher?

There are several reasons I wanted a new program launcher:

1. Wayland and X11 compatibility

Most good program launchers like Rofi, Fuzzel etc. only support either X11 or wayland. Since I still sometimes switch between X11 and Wayland I wanted a launcher, that ran on both systems

2. Wayland clones don't always work

There are some cool projects like Wofi that aim to port X11 programs to Wayland. However I found at least Wofi to have some bugs with my window setup.

3. I wanted a project that can be reasonably finished

I tend to take on huge projects which never end. I saw this as a comparatively simple project.

Known issues

Slow startup time

Due to synchronous file loading the startup times are very slow. This can be fixed by either asynchronously loading icons, using a faster method of icon discovery (the library I am using seems to has to execute gsettings every time, which is very slow)

Scrolling is somewhat weird (and the scroll bar is visible) in egui

The egui ScrollArea does not allow for movement using the arrow keys. This means I had to implement that myself. The method I chose (just remembering the index) does however overwrite the scrolling using the mousewheel/touchpad gestures etc. This means I had to implement the scrolling with the scrollwheel myself, which 'fights' against the default scrolling. This causes minor visual glitches but so far no actual bugs