Application Launcher

Application Launcher

NOTE: this skill only works on Linux desktop environments!

About

Launch applications on the Linux desktop

The standard directories will be scanned for .desktop files, application names and execution commands will be parsed from there

Scanned folders:

• /usr/share/applications/
• /usr/local/share/applications/
• ~/.local/share/applications/

Examples

• "Open Volume Control"
• "Launch Firefox"
• "Close Firefox"

Multiple instances of same Application

In Wayland systems window control is not available and apps are closed exclusively by terminating running processes

In X systems, the launcher prioritizes closing windows over terminating processes if wmctrl is available in your system

This provides a more granular control, allowing multiple instances of applications (such as several Firefox windows) to be managed individually. Even if they share the same PID

If multiple processes with different PIDs match a specific application, it will only close the most recent one by default. However, users can opt for the old behavior, which allows the option to kill all matching processes.

Configuration via settings.json

To customize the behavior of the Application Launcher skill, you can modify the following options in the settings.json file:

Option	Type	Default Value	Description
aliases	Dict[str, List[str]]	{"kcalc": ["calculator"]}	Defines application aliases. Use application names from the .desktop file as keys and a list of speech-friendly names as values.
user_commands	Dict[str, str]	{}	User-defined application commands. Map application names to their corresponding bash commands.
thresh	float	0.85	The threshold for string matching. Lower values will allow more lenient matches for application names.
skip_categories	List[str]	["Settings", "ConsoleOnly", "Building"]	Categories in desktop files that exclude application from being considered.
skip_keywords	List[str]	[]	Keywords in desktop files that exclude application from being considered.
target_categories	List[str]	[]	Categories in desktop files required for application to be considered.
target_keywords	List[str]	[]	Keywords in desktop files required for application to be considered.
blacklist	List[str]	[]	List of applications to ignore during scanning (application names from the .desktop file).
require_icon	bool	True	If set to True, only include applications that have an icon defined in their .desktop file.
require_categories	bool	True	If set to True, only include applications that have at least one category defined in their .desktop file.
terminate_all	bool	False	If True, will terminate all matching processes when closing applications.
shell	bool	False	If True, allows commands to be executed in a shell environment.
disable_window_manager	bool	False	If True, ignores wmctl and exclusively uses running processes for managing apps

eg.

{
  "aliases": {
    "kcalc": ["calculator"]
  },
  "thresh": 0.85,
  "skip_categories": ["Settings", "ConsoleOnly", "Building"],
  "terminate_all": true
}

Category

Productivity

Tags

#desktop #desktop-launch #desktop-launcher