Application Launchers

[Stebalien]

There are a several Linux "app launchers" usable(ish) with EXWM:

• Counsel has a "linux app" launcher (but it only works with counsel).
• There's @SebastienWae's app-launcher, but it hasn't been maintained for a few years.
• I have my own fork (of a fork) of @SebastianWae's package with quite a few improvements.

I'm trying to make this a bit less of a thorny mess for users trying to pick an app launcher. My current plan is to:

1. Move my xdg-launcher fork under this org (assuming the other EXWM maintainers @minad and @medranocalvo are OK with that). I'll probably rename it to xdg-launcher, or something.
2. Publish it on Melpa or non-GNU ELPA. There's no copyright assignment for the original app-launcher so it can't go to ELPA like EXWM (although it has arguably been completely re-written by now).

My fork has a few "works for me"-isms and I'd like to fix the outstanding bugs before continuing.

Thoughts @minad, @medranocalvo, @sarg (who submitted a bunch of fixes to my app-launcher fork)?

[medranocalvo]

I'm OK. (I have not tried the package.) In general, I think that bringing various EXWM packages into the emacs-exwm organization would enable better discovery.

[sarg]

I think app-launcher deserves to be the default launcher for EXWM. I'd only add to your list that app-launcher should be recommended in the "User Guide".

[minad]

Sounds good from my side! Some of the launcher code could maybe even land in EXWM directly to make it a more complete desktop environment. I have this in my config:

(defun +exwm-autostart ()
  "Auto start XDG applications."
  ;; (call-process-shell-command "dex --autostart --environment exwm" nil 0)
  (dolist (dir (delete-dups `(,@(xdg-config-dirs) ,(xdg-config-home))))
    (dolist (file (file-expand-wildcards (file-name-concat dir "autostart/*.desktop")))
      (when-let ((hash (xdg-desktop-read-file file))
                 (exec (gethash "Exec" hash))
                 ((string-search "EXWM" (gethash "OnlyShowIn" hash "EXWM")))
                 ((not (string-search "exwm" (gethash "NotShowIn" hash ""))))
                 ((executable-find (gethash "TryExec" hash "yes")))
                 (default-directory (or (gethash "Path" hash) (expand-file-name "~/"))))
        (call-process-shell-command exec nil 0)))))

[Stebalien]

An auto-start feature in EXWM makes sense but I'd rather not introduce a dependency between the two packages:

• EXWM can't depend on xdg-launcher unless we figure out copyright assignment there.
• xdg-launcher is useful to non-EXWM users, so I'd rather not introduce an EXWM dependency there.

[Stebalien]

I've moved it to https://github.com/emacs-exwm/xdg-launcher but haven't published it yet (want to give upstream a heads-up first SebastienWae/app-launcher#15).