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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.

Erik L. Arneson is a freelance writer and software developer located in Portland, Oregon.

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