Jolly Jolly Jolly is a small bookmarking launcher for desktop usage.
It extends the concept of your browser bookmarking interface, but allows these bookmarks to access files on your local file system, as well as run commands in your shell.
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1356587/208987327-9a314312-8216-4ef9-a373-0e4ddf710bff.mp4
Jolly is hard to install right now. There are no automated builds set
up yet, and it is not published to crates.io yet. The only way to
install it is to clone the repository and build it with cargo build
To use Jolly, simply run the jolly executable. Jolly will look for a
suitable configuration file jolly.toml.
By default, Jolly won't show any results: just tell you how many entries it has loaded:
You can search for an entry by typing in text: Jolly will use the title of the entry and any tags associated with the entry to find results:
To open the entry, you can select it using the arrow and enter keys, or click it with the mouse.
To learn more about the file format used by Jolly, see the file-format page.
To learn more advanced tips and tricks, see the advanced usage page.
There are a lot of really good full featured launcher programs out there, for example, consider launchy, rofi, or alfred. These launcher programs tended to be packed with features, allowing you to do tons of different actions: for example, accessing any installed program or searching for any document on your computer. This can be quite powerful, but it can be overwhelming to see all the choices.
On the other end of the spectrum are notetaking applications, such as onenote, obsidian, or org mode. These are also super powerful, and solve the "noise" problem that launchers have, by only including content that is curated by the user. However, they are focused on the usecase of storing knowledge, not on quickly launching apps and links, which means it can take a couple of click to open a bookmark, instead of the nearly instantaneous feedback of a launcher app.
The other obvious option here would be your web browser. And lets be honest, your web browser's search bar and bookmark interface has thousands more hours of development time poured into it: Jolly can't possibly hope to compete. However, web browsers are focused on web content only, which means that local files and external programs are annoyingly sandboxed away, hard to use with the bookmark interface.
Hence Jolly: the curation of notetaking apps, with the instantaneous gratification of an app launcher, and sharp edges exposed that your web browser doesn't want you to have.