An Emacs Application Launcher for Regolith

2025-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

I run the Regolith Desktop Environment on my laptop, which I love because it provides a convenient GNOME wrapper and interface for the i3 tiling window manager. Regolith relies on a program called ilia for application launching, and sometimes ilia gets caught in some kind of CPU-churning state that locks up my whole system. I have not been able to figure out what is causing it, so I (of course) turned to Emacs for a solution.

Turning to `consult-omni`

Armin Darvish has created a powerful Emacs package called consult-omni, which provides a wrapper around consult for searching through any number of information sources. I believe consult-omni was originally intended to query web search engines and document databases, but Darvish has also provided a search mode for your local desktop applications, and can act as an application launcher.

Darvish provides an example application launcher in his consult-omni YouTube tutorial. The source code is straightforward, but I wanted to tweak it just a little. You can view his original on the project’s wiki on GitHub. You can watch him explain his technique below.

After a few tweaks, here is what I came up with.

(defun consult-launcher ()
  "A launcher suitable for use from a window manager."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((width (floor (* 0.6 (display-pixel-width))))
         (height (floor (* 0.6 (display-pixel-height))))
         (left (floor (* 0.2 (display-pixel-width))))
         (top (floor (* 0.2 (display-pixel-height))))
         (params `((name . "omni-launcher")
                   (width . ,(cons 'text-pixels width))
                   (height . ,(cons 'text-pixels height))
                   (left . ,left)
                   (top . ,top)
                   (minibuffer . only)))
         (frame (make-frame params)))
    (with-selected-frame frame
      (select-frame-set-input-focus frame)
      ;; If i3 is running and there is a control socket, let's tell
      ;; it we are a floating frame.
      (if (getenv "I3SOCK")
          (call-process "i3-msg" nil nil nil
                        (format "[id=%s] floating enable"
                                (s-trim (shell-command-to-string "xdotool getactivewindow")))))
      (unwind-protect
          (progn (consult-omni-apps-static ".*" (propertize "> " 'face 'consult-omni-path-face))
                 nil)
        (progn
          (when (frame-live-p frame) (delete-frame frame))
          nil)))))

I made two changes to get this to work nicely with i3. First, I removed the yequake dependency. Second, I added a call to i3-msg that sets the launcher frame as floating, which makes it much nicer to use. Like Darvish’s version, you can run this from the command line:

emacsclient -e '(consult-launcher)'

Adding an `ilia` fallback

Don’t tell all the other Emacs users, but I don’t have Emacs set up to launch automatically when I start my computer and log into X11. I probably should, huh? Also, there are times when I (gasp!) shut down Emacs, usually to restart it or fix something that I have broken. When those times happen, I want to be able to launch applications, so I need a failsafe in case consult-launcher isn’t available!

To solve this, I created a simple shell wrapper script, which looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

# Check if Emacs server is running by looking for the server socket
# Default server name is "server", but you can change this if needed
SERVER_NAME="${EMACS_SERVER_NAME:-server}"
SERVER_FILE="${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR:-/tmp}/emacs/${SERVER_NAME}"

if [ -S "$SERVER_FILE" ]; then
    # Emacs is running, use emacsclient to launch your application
    emacsclient -e '(consult-launcher)'
else
    # Emacs is not running, fall back to ilia
    ilia -p apps
fi

If you want to use this, the important part is that SERVER_FILE points to the socket that your Emacs server uses. Make sure that emacsclient and ilia are both in a reasonable location so your shell can find them, then bind this command to whatever you usually use to launch ilia.

By the way, if you are using Regolith’s normal method of launching ilia, you can add your shell script to your Regolith configuration pretty easily. Open $HOME/.config/regolith3/Xresources in your text editor, and add the line:

wm.program.launcher.app: /path/to/your/launcher.sh

You can then run xrdb -override $HOME/.config/regolith3/Xresources and it should work! Good luck.

Drawbacks

One of the nice things about ilia is that it keeps track of applications your run frequently, so they tend to bubble up to the top of its application listing. The Emacs method doesn’t do that. I don’t mind so much, I always end up typing in application names. It is fun to use Emacs as an application launcher, and I hope that it helps me avoid the CPU-churn problem that ilia has been experiencing far too often.

Have I come up with a clever solution, or a lazy workaround? I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Handy Tools for the Bourne Again Shell

2014-12-01T16:38:30+00:00

If you’re a Unix geek, you’ve probably used bash, the Bourne-Again Shell. If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably spent a lot of time customizing bash.

Back when I worked for Yahoo!, my friend Bryan gave me a great directory stack for bash. I loved it, so I rewrote it and have been hacking on it and using it ever since. Observe.

[user@host:~]$ cd /tmp
[user@host:/tmp]$ cd /var/log
[user@host:/var/log]$ dl
1   ~
2   /tmp
3 * /var/log
[user@host:/var/log]$ go 1
1   /home/user
[user@host:~]$ go log
3   /var/log
[user@host:/var/log]$ 

In addition to the handy new go command, it also includes b and f for moving backwards and forwards on the stack. It was inspired by pushd and popd, but it’s so much more.

If you’d like to check it out, take a look at my bashtools repository on GitHub or just download version 1.0. I don’t change it very often, but I’m thinking of hammering out a long-standing bug in the directory stack code.

N.B. If you use all of my scripts, you’ll get some great prompts for your xterms. You’re welcome!

Erik L. Arneson — Writer and Software Developer

An Emacs Application Launcher for Regolith

Turning to consult-omni

Adding an ilia fallback

Drawbacks

Handy Tools for the Bourne Again Shell

Turning to `consult-omni`

Adding an `ilia` fallback