BobLauncher

This is a Wayland launcher inspired by the venerable Synapse Launcher.

A GPU-accelerated launcher using Gtk4 and Vala with performance critical parts written in pure C. BobLauncher aims to provide a useful, user friendly, beautiful, and fast launcher.

Highlights

output.mp4

• Beautiful design out of the box -- or hand roll your own CSS!
• Simple controls: there is only bob-launcher. Bind it to your preferred keybindings, launch it in background as a service with bob-launcher --gapplication-service, or launch plugins directly using the syntax bob-launcher --select-plugin <plugin> [query].
• High quality plugins. Plugins have been specifically crafted for BobLauncher, many of which utilize multiprocessing with the sharded search.
• Amazing matching that just works™: It uses an adapted Levenshtein distance algorithm from fzy. We aim to always provide the most relevant match.
• Optional layer shell integration

Installation

Building from Source

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

Dependencies

• GTK4
• GLib
• Wayland
• GTK4 Layer Shell

Usage

BobLauncher is designed to be simple:

bob-launcher                                  # Invoke BobLauncher
bob-launcher --gapplication-service           # Start the app without launching the GUI
bob-launcher --select-plugin <plugin> [query] # Launch a specific plugin

Plugins

You will need plugins to be able to do anything useful. Check out the available plugins at GitHub

Performance

BobLauncher is built with performance as a primary goal. Performance-critical parts are written in C, so you should be able to query to your heart's content without stutter.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! We are still in beta, so there will be bugs.