nwg-drawer

This application is a part of the nwg-shell project.

Nwg-drawer is an application launcher. It's being developed with sway and Hyprland in mind, but should also work with other wlroots-based Wayland compositors.

The nwg-drawer command displays the application grid. The search entry allows to look for installed applications, and for files in XDG user directories. The grid view may also be filtered by categories.

You may pin applications by right-clicking them. Pinned items will appear above the application grid. Right-click a pinned item to unpin it. The pinned items cache is shared with nwg-menu.

Below the grid there is the power bar - a row of buttons to lock the screen, exit the compositor, reboot, suspend and power the machine off. For each button to appear, you need to provide a corresponding command. See "Command line arguments" below. If the power bar is present, pressing Tab will move focus to its first button.

To close the window w/o running a program, you may use the Esc key, or right-click the window next to the grid.

Installation

Dependencies

• go
• gtk3
• gtk-layer-shell
• xdg-utils

Optional (recommended):

• thunar
• foot

You may use another file manager and terminal emulator (see command line arguments), but mentioned above have been confirmed to work well with the program. Also see Files below.

Steps

1. Clone the repository, cd into it.
2. Install necessary golang libraries with make get.
3. make build
4. sudo make install

Command line arguments

$ nwg-drawer -h
Usage of nwg-drawer:
  -c uint
    	number of Columns (default 6)
  -close
    	close drawer of existing instance
  -d	Turn on Debug messages
  -fm string
    	File Manager (default "thunar")
  -fscol uint
    	File Search result COLumns (default 2)
  -fslen int
    	File Search name LENgth Limit (default 80)
  -ft
    	Force Theme for libadwaita apps, by adding 'GTK_THEME=<default-gtk-theme>' env var
  -g string
    	GTK theme name
  -i string
    	GTK icon theme name
  -is int
    	Icon Size (default 64)
  -k	set GTK layer shell Keyboard interactivity to 'on-demand' mode
  -lang string
    	force lang, e.g. "en", "pl"
  -mb int
    	Margin Bottom
  -ml int
    	Margin Left
  -mr int
    	Margin Right
  -mt int
    	Margin Top
  -nocats
    	Disable filtering by category
  -nofs
    	Disable file search
  -o string
    	name of the Output to display the drawer on (sway & Hyprland only)
  -open
    	open drawer of existing instance
  -ovl
    	use OVerLay layer
  -pbexit string
    	command for the Exit power bar icon
  -pblock string
    	command for the Lock power bar icon
  -pbpoweroff string
    	command for the Poweroff power bar icon
  -pbreboot string
    	command for the Reboot power bar icon
  -pbsize int
    	power bar icon size (only works w/ built-in icons) (default 64)
  -pbsleep string
    	command for the sleep power bar icon
  -pbuseicontheme
    	use icon theme instead of built-in icons in power bar
  -r	Leave the program resident in memory
  -s string
    	Styling: css file name (default "drawer.css")
  -spacing uint
    	icon spacing (default 20)
  -term string
    	Terminal emulator (default "foot")
  -v	display Version information
  -wm string
    	use swaymsg exec (with 'sway' argument) or hyprctl dispatch exec (with 'hyprland') to launch programs

NOTE: the $TERM environment variable overrides the -term argument.

Running

You may use the drawer in two ways:

1. Simply run the nwg-drawer command, by adding a key binding to your sway config file, e.g.:

bindsym Mod1+F1 exec nwg-drawer

2. Run a resident instance on startup, and use the nwg-drawer command to show the window, e.g.:

exec_always nwg-drawer -r
bindsym Mod1+F1 exec nwg-drawer

The second line does nothing but pkill -USR1 nwg-drawer, so you may just use this command instead. Actually this should be a little bit faster.

Running a resident instance should speed up use of the drawer significantly. Pay attention to the fact, that you need to pkill -f nwg-drawer and reload the compositor to apply any new arguments!

If you want to explicitly specify commands to open and close the resident instance, which can be helpful for touchpad gestures, please use the -open and -close parameters. Similarly, some signals can also be use: pkill -USR2 nwg-drawer to open and pkill -SIGRTMIN+3 nwg-drawer to close.

For a MacOS-style three-finger pinch:

bindgesture pinch:4:inward exec pkill -SIGUSR2 nwg-drawer
bindgesture pinch:4:outward exec pkill -SIGRTMIN+3 nwg-drawer

Logging

In case you encounter an issue, you may need debug messages. If you use the resident instance, you'll see nothing in the terminal. Please edit your sway config file:

exec nwg-drawer -r -d 2> ~/drawer.log

exit sway, launch it again and include the drawer.log content in the GitHub issue. Do not use exec_always here: it'll destroy the log file content on sway reload.

Styling

Edit ~/.config/nwg-drawer/drawer.css to your taste.

File search

When the search phrase is at least 3 characters long, your XDG user directories are being searched.

Use the left mouse button to open a file with the xdg-open command. As configuring file associations for it is PITA, you may override them, by creating the ~/.config/nwg-drawer/preferred-apps.json file with your own definitions.

Sample preferred-apps.json file content

{
  "\\.pdf$": "atril",
  "\\.svg$": "inkscape",
  "\\.(jpg|png|tiff|gif)$": "swayimg",
  "\\.(mp3|ogg|flac|wav|wma)$": "audacious",
  "\\.(avi|mp4|mkv|mov|wav)$": "mpv",
  "\\.(doc|docx|xls|xlsx)$": "libreoffice"
}

Use the right mouse button to open the file with your file manager (see -fm argument). The result depends on the file manager you use.

• thunar will open the file location
• pcmanfm will open the file with its associated program
• caja won't open anything, except for directories

I've noy yet tried other file managers.

File search exclusions

You may want to exclude some paths inside your XDG user directories from searching. If so, define exclusions in the ~/.config/nwg-drawer/excluded-dirs file, e.g. like this:

# exclude all paths containing 'node_modules'
node_modules

Calculations in the search box

If the search box is not empty, and you press Enter, the search box content will be evaluated as an arithmetic operation. If the result is not an error, it will be displayed in a small window, and copied to the clipboard with wl-copy. Press any key to close the window.

You may change the result label styling e.g. like this:

/* math operation result label */
#math-label {
    font-weight: bold;
    font-size: 16px
}

Credits

This program uses some great libraries:

• gotk3 Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Conformal Systems LLC, Copyright (c) 2015-2018 gotk3 contributors
• gotk3-layershell by @dlasky - many thanks for writing this software, and for patience with my requests!
• go-sway Copyright (c) 2019 Joshua Rubin
• go-singleinstance Copyright (c) 2015 Allan Simon
• logrus Copyright (c) 2014 Simon Eskildsen
• fsnotify Copyright (c) 2012-2019 fsnotify Authors
• expr Copyright (c) 2018 Anton Medvedev