Add Application Launcher

[Aetherall]

Hi ! I discovered hyprpanel today and besides the app launcher it really does it all for me !

So I am proposing my help to add an optional one ( I will surely contribute some more features in the future )

For now this is a really crude draft of an application launcher menu ( dropdown & popup )

it is my first time using gtk and astal and surely made a lot of mistakes.
I couldnt make keyboard navigation work, even trying to use the Gtk3 ListBox and ListBoxRow.

Also I didnt do any styling for now and just reused notification menu styles.

hyprpanel t applicationsmenu

hyprpanel t applicationsmenudropdown

PS:

• do you guys have live reload in development ?
• is the .js extensions in imports mandatory for the code to build and the lsp to work in your system ? On my system it breaks (nix flakes) because astal pulled as typescript sources and only compiled along with hyperpanel so not resolvable in dev. Removing the .js extensions on astal package does fix it for me.
• is a gtk4 migration planned ? I can contribute on that too to keep up with astal :)

Thanks for this awesome project !
Happy new year !

[Aetherall]

My issue with imports seems to have be solved today, i'll rebase tomorrow :)

[Jas-SinghFSU]

Apologies for the late reply, been super busy at work and hoping to get back into the groove here.

do you guys have live reload in development ?

No, though I'm sure with some tooling you could set it up to some degree by monitoring file changes and auto-restarting the panel.

is the .js extensions in imports mandatory for the code to build and the lsp to work in your system ? On my system it breaks (nix flakes) because astal pulled as typescript sources and only compiled along with hyperpanel so not resolvable in dev. Removing the .js extensions on astal package does fix it for me.

Probably not since ESBuild (used by AGS) is smart enough to resolve paths without extensions. This is more-so just the default behavior of auto-imports on the typescript LSP.

is a gtk4 migration planned ? I can contribute on that too to keep up with astal :)

Yes :) But I haven't looked into GTK4 to see whether it would satisfy all of the requirements.

[Aetherall]

@Jas-SinghFSU Same ahah no worries

No, though I'm sure with some tooling you could set it up to some degree by monitoring file changes and auto-restarting the panel.

I made an PR on AGS to add support for the esbulid watch mode, i've been using it successfully on hyprpanel, but its yet to be reviewed. Aylur/ags#660

I've been using this Application Launcher since this MR, but I dont feel confortable to merge it until I get keyboard navigation support there.
I have no time to work on this right now so if anyone wants to tackle that feel free!

[idea90]

MERGE NOW Or else

[Jas-SinghFSU]

MERGE NOW Or else

U wot m8?

[Jas-SinghFSU]

Solid draft but we definitely want to flesh it out more and make it customizable. I'll look into it.

[Aetherall]

MERGE NOW Or else

Please be my guest, if you want to branch off this PR and finish it.
You can also start a bounty issue if you want someone to do it for you

@Jas-SinghFSU thanks a lot :)

I noted some points not to overlook:

• Keyboard support for arrow keys and / hjkl
• Reset search string variable on open
  i dont know the lifecycle of the underlying gtk resource, so it may be safer to do it while we know it is instanciated for sure
• Integration with the styling system
• Tuning of the search ponderation, feels pretty useless right now besides for the 1st result
• Challenge the helper functions used, they resemble patterns i'm familiar with, but may not be good practices for ags/astal nor align with rest of the codebase.

Don't hesitate to share a todo if you find the time to look into it but not to implement the changes, so I may help during my next vacations ( idk when yet )