Warning

This project is in a very early beta stage.

The system is undergoing constant changes and may contain serious bugs, performance issues, or memory leaks.

Use it with caution and expect instability.

I’m currently working on three “ice” projects simultaneously—there’s only so much I can realistically handle at once.

☄️ Icelauncher

Icelauncher is a lightweight, Wayland application launcher written in Rust, powered by iced and iced-layer-shell.

It aims to provide a minimal, fast, and fully themeable launcher designed for wlroots and smithay compositors (Hyprland, Sway, Niri, etc.), with real icon support, grid layout, and deep configurability via a RON config file.

Built for people who want a clean, keyboard-driven launcher without pulling in an entire desktop environment.

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✨ Features

• 🧊 Native Wayland layer-shell launcher
• ⚡ Written entirely in Rust
• 🎨 UI powered by iced
• 🖼 Real app icons fetched from the system icon theme
• 🔲 Grid layout support (list or NxN grid)
• ⌨️ Full keyboard navigation (arrows, enter, escape, and configurable keybinds)
• ⚡ Quick-launch shortcuts (Alt+1 through Alt+9)
• 🔍 Scored search across name, comment, exec, and keywords — with fuzzy fallback
• 🖥 Terminal app support via configurable terminal command
• 🧮 Built-in calculator mode
• 🔥 Frecency tracking — frequently launched apps surface automatically
• 🐚 Shell mode for command launching (--shell / -s)
• 📋 wl-copy integration for copying calculator results
• 🎛 Fully themeable via RON config (colors, borders, shadows, radii, fonts, spacing, scrollbar, separators...)
• 🪶 Lightweight and compositor-friendly

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🧠 What Icelauncher Does

Icelauncher is not a traditional desktop environment launcher.

Instead, it acts as a:

• Wayland layer-shell surface
• .desktop file scanner and parser
• System icon theme resolver
• Keyboard-driven application picker

Core responsibilities

• Scans .desktop files from standard XDG directories
• Resolves real app icons from the system icon theme (hicolor, Papirus, Adwaita, Flatpak, etc.)
• Renders a searchable, navigable list or grid of applications
• Launches the selected app (with optional terminal wrapping)
• Closes itself after launch

Conceptually:

.desktop Files ──scan──▶ Icelauncher Core
                              │
                              ▼
                       Icon Theme Resolver
                              │
                              ▼
                        iced UI Renderer
                              │
                              ▼
                    Wayland Layer Surface

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🖥 Supported Environments

Icelauncher targets smithay and wlroots based compositors, including:

• Hyprland
• Sway
• Niri
• Others layer-shell compatible compositors

X11 is not supported.

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📦 Tech Stack

• Rust
• iced (GUI framework)
• iced_layershell
• RON (config format)
• tokio (async runtime)

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🚀 Installation

AUR (Recommended):

paru -S icelauncher-git

or

yay -S icelauncher-git

--

Building From Source:

Requirements:

• Rust/Cargo (stable/2024 edition)
• gcc-libs

git clone https://github.com/HaruNashii/icelauncher
cd icelauncher
cargo build --release
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/bin
cp -rf target/release/icelauncher $HOME/.local/bin/

Tip: Bind it to a key in your compositor config for best results.

• Example (Hyprland):

bind = $mod, D, exec, icelauncher

• Example (Sway):

bindsym $mod+d exec icelauncher

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🐚 Shell Mode

Launch Icelauncher in shell mode to search and run arbitrary commands instead of .desktop entries:

icelauncher --shell
# or
icelauncher -s

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🎨 Configuration

On first launch, Icelauncher generates a default config at:

~/.config/icelauncher/config.ron

The config is fully documented inline. Every visual and behavioural property is tuneable.

Config Sections

Section	What it controls
window	Size, padding, grid columns, border, shadow, background
scrollbar	Rail color, scroller color, border, width, margin
search	Placeholder, font size, colors, border, position, orientation
entry	Name/comment font, padding, hover/selected/pressed colors, separators, shortcuts
icon	Real vs abstract icons, size, colors, border, gradients
footer	Hint text, result count, colors, position
behaviour	Search fields, case sensitivity, terminal command, calculator, frecency, close on launch
keybinds	Navigation keys, close key, quick-launch prefix

Color Formats

All color values support three formats:

RGB((255, 255, 255))
RGBA((255, 255, 255, 80))   // alpha is 0–100
HEX("3d3d3d")               // 6-digit or 8-digit hex

Grid Layout

Set grid_side_items in the window section to control columns:

grid_side_items: 1   // classic list
grid_side_items: 3   // 3-column grid

Real Icons

Set use_real_icons: true in the icon section to fetch icons from your system theme. Icelauncher searches hicolor, your active GTK theme, Adwaita, Papirus, Flatpak exports, and more automatically.

Terminal Apps

To support .desktop entries with Terminal=true, set your terminal command:

terminal_command: "kitty -e"
// or: "alacritty -e" | "foot" | "wezterm -e"

Calculator Mode

When calc_enabled: true (default), typing a math expression shows the result inline as the first entry. Press Enter to copy it to clipboard via wl-copy.

calc_enabled: true

Frecency

Icelauncher tracks how often and how recently you launch each app. Apps above a configurable launch count threshold get a 🔥 badge and are ranked higher on empty queries.

show_hot_apps:      true
hot_apps_threshold: 4       // launches needed to show badge
hot_apps_icon:      "🔥"

Quick-Launch Shortcuts

The first 9 results can be launched directly with Alt+1 through Alt+9 (prefix is configurable):

keybinds: (
    launch_alt_prefix: "Alt",
)

---

🧩 Architecture Overview

src/
├── main.rs          → application entry point, AppData, Message, update logic
├── subscription.rs  → iced subscriptions (keyboard events)
├── update.rs        → iced message handler (launch, scroll, hover, copy feedback)
├── view.rs          → iced renderer
├── ron.rs           → RON config structs + loader
├── helpers/*.rs     → app scanning, icon resolution, search, style helpers

Key Systems

1. Layer Shell Integration

• Creates a centered Wayland overlay surface without a desktop environment.

2. .desktop Scanner

• Reads XDG application directories including user installs, system installs, Flatpak, and Distrobox host paths.

3. Icon Resolver

• Walks the system icon theme tree (standard layout, alternate layout, Flatpak exports, pixmaps) to find the best matching icon for each app.

4. Search Engine

• Scores and ranks results across name, comment, exec, and keywords.
• Uses SIMD-accelerated substring matching (via memchr) as the primary pass, with a fuzzy scorer as fallback for near-matches.
• Results are tiered: name prefix → name contains → keyword → exec → comment → fuzzy, then broken by frecency score.

5. Frecency Tracker

• Records launch timestamps and counts per app. Combines recency and frequency into a single score used for empty-query sorting and hot-app badges.

6. Calculator

• Evaluates math expressions entered in the search bar and surfaces the result as a selectable entry. Copies the result via wl-copy on launch.

7. Event Model

• Follows iced's update/view architecture:
  • Message → Update → State → View

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⚠️ Current Status

Experimental / Work in Progress. Expect:

• breaking changes
• incomplete features
• rapid iteration

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🪲 Known Bugs

• Crashing on GNOME
  • Explanation: Icelauncher depends on Layer Shell which GNOME has not implemented yet.

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🛠 Roadmap (Planned Ideas)

• Plugin/custom module API
• Better icon caching
• Animations (very low priority)

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Good areas to help:

• Wayland handling
• iced widgets
• icon theme compatibility
• performance improvements
• compositor testing

Steps:

fork → branch → commit → pull request

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📜 License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.