MOUNCH - a simple WOFI/ROFI launcher

Description

Mounch is a simple launcher using ROFI on Xorg or WOFI on Wayland backed by a yaml configuration file.

You simply define a set of configuration blocks for some custom commands and it will show them with the awesome rofi. The items are sorted by frequency or as the order coming from the mounch.yaml config file.

Why not just use dmenu rofi module you may ask ?

• I simply did not want to have to create a .desktop file for every apps I have, and find it much simpler to have everything in a simple yaml definition.
• I did not want to have the launcher offering everythign I have on my system
• I wanted a curated list
• I wanted some title that differs from what's shipped on the .desktop from the system.
• I switch often between desktop/wm (ie: gnome/sway) and display system (xorg/wayland) and I want entries depending of the current environement
• And I wanted to have static ordering as well as frequency based one, which is fitting my workflow.

Requirements

• rofi >= 1.6.0
• wofi for wayland
• PyYaml

Screenshot

Installation

Arch AUR

• Package available from here:

  https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mounch/

  example config file in /usr/share/doc/mounch and helpers in /usr/share/mounch/

  rofi theme is preinstalled in /usr/share/rofi/themes/

Manual

1. Checkout this repository with git :

    mkdir ~/git/
    git clone https://github.com/chmouel/mounch  ~/git/mounch
   

2. Copy the theme to your rofi config directory :

    mkdir -p ~/.config/rofi && cp ~/git/mounch/rofi/mounch.rasi ~/.config/rofi/
   

3. Setup your mounch.yaml in ~/.config/mounch/mounch.yaml look at the example here.

4. Depending on how you setup your desktop setup a key to launch the main script in ~/git/mounch/mounch.py if you have followed thru.

5. Install pyyaml python library (which you probably have already), packages are called

Configuration

The basic definition look like this :

firefox:
  binary: gtk-launch
  args: firefox
  description: "Firefox"
  icon: firefox

You are starting by a unique id as a key from this yaml snippet called firefox, you launch a binary called gtk-launch which is a standard gtk tool who launch your desktop application, you give the args firefox and you use the icon firefox which is picked up from your local icon files.

• args can be a list, ie: args: ["firefox", "https://linux.com/"]

• binaries are looked into your path.

• the icons is the standard freedesktop ones, add new ones in for example:

  ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/

• and if you like you can add some condition too with the if keyword, it must return a python boolean, ie:

firefox:
  binary: gtk-launch
  args: spotify
  description: "Spotify"
  icon: spotify
  if: 'shutil.which("spotify")'

see a most complete example here.

By default mounch add some sane arguments to rofi or wofi if you don't want them and want to let the launcher config files set the options then use the -N/--no-defaults option.

Wayland

When detecting wayland it will try to use wofi instead of rofi, you can specify --use-rofi to force use rofi.

There is currently a bug with the stable version of wofi where the "--allow-images" flag doesn't get parsed.

The bug is fixed in the development branch of wofi and until then you will need to add this directive directly to your ~/.config/wofi/config :

allow_images=true

There is multiples options you can configure to tweak wofi with its config, see wofi(5), here is mine :

allow_images=true
colors=colors
filter_rate=100
allow_markup=true
lines=15

It works well with the dracula wofi theme (as seen on the screenshot)

If you run sway you may want to do this for your configuration so sway execute the command directly :

set $menu mounch -p
bindsym $mod+d exec $menu|xargs swaymsg exec --

If you run with Gnome on Wayland, you may want to make it to center new window automatically or mutter (the gnome wm) will show the windows randomly around the screen, which is quite annoying with a launcher like wofi, you just need to run this command to make it automatically centers them :

dconf write /org/gnome/mutter/center-new-windows true

Internals

We cache all entries in a simple file in $HOME/.cache/mounch/cache, it's simple and has only the id name and the number of times the entry has been launched. Before launch we sort that list and display the top hit at the top and the rest as configured in the mounch.yaml config file. After launch we increase the counter and rewrite the cache file.

Alternatives

I rewrote it in rust, with a bit different syntax and focused to wofi/wayland called raffi and available here https://github.com/chmouel/raffi. This python version goes as fast as the rust version, there is no reason to switch if you don't care.

Misc

• License: Apache License
• Authors: Chmouel Boudjnah chmouel@chmouel.com