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:
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.
So, this is the early prototype. It is usable and should already work and be useful, but much is not working yet. I hope this time I will continue the work for longer ;)
shellex has three parts:
- A small shell-script that just starts a
urxvtwith some extra parameters - An urxvt-extension that manages the terminal/displaying part.
- configfile that do all stuff relating to the functional behaviour
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 yet:
- Buffering/showing some output, for errors etc. We have to think about some magic way to determine, wether 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?)
- .desktop-file integration
- Your ticket here
There are packages in
- debian
- Arch Linux: Arch User Repository (latest Release and git-Repository)
- Gentoo: there is an Overlay which contains shellex
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 checkout git://github.com/Merovius/shellex.git
$ cd shellex
$ make
$ make installshellex 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:
- Test it and make tickets for any problems you stumble upon or ideas you have to make it better.
- 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.
- 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.
- Customize
shellexin 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. - 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.
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 |
The other source of configuration are small shell-script-snippets. When
starting, shellex will look into $HOME/.shellex and into /etc/shellex. It
will then source all the snippets in either location. If there is an
identically named file in both directories, the one in your home will be
preferred.
This makes for a pretty flexible configuration process: Usually there will be a
lot of snippets in /usr/lib/shellex/conf, which should be self-contained and
without a lot of side-effects. In /etc/shellex there then are some symlinks
to those snippets, making up the default-configuration on this system, together
with administrator-provided additional defaults. Whenever you don't want a
snippet form /etc/shellex to be used, just create a symlink of the same name
to /dev/null in $HOME/.shellex. If you want to create your own snippets,
just put them in $HOME/.shellex under a name not used yet and it will be
automatically sourced.
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