anyrun

A wayland native krunner-like runner, made with customizability in mind.

Features

• Style customizability with GTK+ CSS
  • More info in Styling
• Can do basically anything
  • As long as it can work with input and selection
  • Hence the name anyrun
• Easy to make plugins
  • You only need 4 functions!
  • See Rink for a simple example. More info in the documentation of the anyrun-plugin crate.
• Responsive
  • Asynchronous running of plugin functions
• Wayland native
  • GTK layer shell for overlaying the window
  • data-control for managing the clipboard

Usage

Dependencies

Anyrun mainly depends various GTK libraries, and rust of course for building the project. Rust you can get with rustup. The rest are statically linked in the binary. Here are the libraries you need to have to build & run it:

• gtk-layer-shell (libgtk-layer-shell)
• gtk3 (libgtk-3 libgdk-3)
• pango (libpango-1.0)
• cairo (libcairo libcairo-gobject)
• gdk-pixbuf2 (libgdk_pixbuf-2.0)
• glib2 (libgobject-2.0 libgio-2.0 libglib-2.0)

Installation

Make sure all of the dependencies are installed, and then run the following commands in order:

git clone https://github.com/Kirottu/anyrun.git # Clone the repository
cd anyrun # Change the active directory to it
cargo build --release # Build all the packages
cargo install --path anyrun/ # Install the anyrun binary
mkdir -p ~/.config/anyrun/plugins # Create the config directory and the plugins subdirectory
cp target/release/*.so ~/.config/anyrun/plugins # Copy all of the built plugins to the correct directory

After that you need to create the configuration file and place it in ~/.config/anyrun/config.ron. A config file with all of the included plugins is as follows:

Config(
  width: 800,
  plugins: [
    "libapplications.so",
    "libsymbols.so",
    "libshell.so",
    "libtranslate.so",
  ],
)

Plugins

Anyrun requires plugins to function, as they provide the results for input. The list of plugins in this repository is as follows:

• Applications
  • Search and run system & user specific desktop entries
• Symbols
  • Search unicode symbols
  • User defined symbols
• Rink
  • Calculator & unit conversion
• Shell
  • Run shell commands

Configuration

The default configuration directory is $HOME/.config/anyrun the structure of the config directory is as follows and should be respected by plugins:

- anyrun
  - plugins
    <plugin dynamic libraries>
  config.ron
  style.css
  <any plugin specific config files>

The config file has the following structure, and as seen in the name uses the ron language:

Config(
  width: 800, // The width of the window
  plugins: [
    "libapplications.so", // Relative paths are looked up in the <config dir>/plugins/ directory
    "/home/kirottu/Projects/anyrun/target/debug/libsymbols.so", // Absolute paths are well, asbolute and loaded as is. Useful for development.
  ],
)

Styling

Anyrun supports GTK+ CSS styling. The names for the different widgets and widgets associated with them are as follows:

• entry: The entry box
  • GtkEntry
• window: The window
  • GtkWindow
• main: "Main" parts of the layout
  • GtkListBox: The main list containing the plugins
  • GtkBox: The box combining the main list and the entry box
• plugin: Anything for the entire plugin
  • GtkLabel: The name of the plugin
  • GtkBox: The different boxes in the plugin view
  • GtkImage: The icon of the plugin
• match: Widgets of a specific match
  • GtkBox: The main box of the match and the box containing the title and the description if present
  • GtkImage: The icon of the match (if present)
• match-title: Specific for the title of the match
  • GtkLabel
• match-desc: Specific for the description of the match
  • GtkLabel

Arguments

The custom arguments for anyrun are as follows:

• --config-dir, -c: Override the configuration directory
• --override-plugins, -o: Override the plugins to be used, provided in the same way as in the config file.

Plugin development

The plugin API is intentionally very simple to use. This is all you need for a plugin:

Cargo.toml:

#[package] omitted
[lib]
crate-type = ["cdylib"] # Required to build a dynamic library that can be loaded by anyrun

[dependencies]
anyrun-plugin = { git = "https://github.com/Kirottu/anyrun" }
abi_stable = "0.11.1"
# Any other dependencies you may have

lib.rs:

use abi_stable::std_types::{RString, RVec, ROption};
use anyrun_plugin::{plugin, PluginInfo, Match, HandleResult};

fn init(config_dir: RString) {
  // Your initialization code. This is run in another thread.
  // The return type is the data you want to share between functions
}

fn info() -> PluginInfo {
  PluginInfo {
    name: "Demo".into(),
    icon: "help-about".into(), // Icon from the icon theme
  }
}

fn get_matches(input: RString, data: &mut ()) -> RVec<Match> {
  // The logic to get matches from the input text in the `input` argument.
  // The `data` is a mutable reference to the shared data type later specified. 
  vec![Match {
    title: "Test match".into(),
    icon: ROption::RSome("help-about"),
    description: ROption::RSome("Test match for the plugin API demo"),
    id: ROption::RNone, // The ID can be used for identifying the match later, is not required
  }].into()
}

fn handler(selection: Match, data: &mut ()) -> HandleResult {
  // Handle the selected match and return how anyrun should proceed
  HandleResult::Close
}

// The type of the data we want to store is the last one, we don't need it in this one so it can be the unit type.
plugin!(init, info, get_matches, handler, ());

And that's it! That's all of the API needed to make runners. Refer to the plugins in the plugins folder for more examples.