Anyrun

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

---

This repo was forked to have some more fresh dependencies and plugins, small and big fixes/refactors, etc

Currently work on my fork will be frozen due to working on UniRun. If you want Anyrun you can clone and build this, or some early version which is very close to the original, but with more fresh dependencies

check out fork comments

and if you are interested in development/have some ideas/wanna share you opinion

I will be glad if you visit issues and discussions

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

Screenshots

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:

• gtk4-layer-shell (libgtk4-layer-shell.so)
• gtk4 (libgtk-4.so)
• pango (libpango-1.0)
• cairo (libcairo libcairo-gobject)
• gdk-pixbuf2 (libgdk_pixbuf-2.0)
• glib2 (libgobject-2.0 libgio-2.0 libglib-2.0)

Note

gdk-pixbuf2 (libgdk_pixbuf-2.0) maybe don't need

Installation

Note

As long as this is fork and I'm writing it mostly for myself

it's not packaged at all (packaging stats here is about original project)

If you really want to use this fork so better build it

Nix

See Nix.md

Manual installation

1. Make sure all of the dependencies are installed

2. Clone the repo

   git clone --recursive https://github.com/bzglve/anyrun.git

3. Change dir

   cd anyrun

4. Run install.sh or the following commands in order:

   cargo build --release # Build all the packages
   cargo install --path anyrun/ # Install the anyrun binary
   sudo mkdir -p /etc/xdg/anyrun/plugins # Create the config directory and the plugins subdirectory
   sudo cp target/release/*.so /etc/xdg/anyrun/plugins # Copy all of the built plugins to the correct directory
   sudo cp examples/config.ron /etc/xdg/anyrun/config.ron # Copy the default config file

5. For saving app state used glib schemas so you need to copy defined schemas to glib schemas folder and compile them

   mkdir -p ~/.local/share/glib-2.0/schemas
   cp settings/1/* ~/.local/share/glib-2.0/schemas
   glib-compile-schemas ~/.local/share/glib-2.0/schemas

Note

Custom configs should be placed into $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/anyrun ($HOME/.config/anyrun)

You can run the following to copy default config to custom

cp -r /etc/xdg/anyrun ~/.config/

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.
• Rink
  • Calculator & unit conversion.
• Shell
  • Run shell commands.
• Translate
  • Quickly translate text.
• Kidex
  • File search provided by Kidex.
• Randr
  • Rotate and resize; quickly change monitor configurations on the fly.
  • TODO: Only supports Hyprland, needs support for other compositors.
• Stdin
  • Turn Anyrun into a dmenu like fuzzy selector.
  • Should generally be used exclusively with the --plugins argument.
• Dictionary
  • Look up definitions for words
• Websearch
  • Search the web with configurable engines: Google, Ecosia, Bing, DuckDuckGo.

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 default config file contains the default values, and annotates all configuration options with comments on what they are and how to use them.

Styling

Note

Currently with ScrolledWindow you can leave all styles empty/comment all out/remove file/etc

Warning

May be changes, not tested

By default is used default GTK theme (as it's GTK application, right?)

But 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

The rest of the arguments are automatically generated based on the config, and can be used to override configuration parameters. For example if you want to temporarily only run the Applications and Symbols plugins on the top side of the screen, you would run anyrun --plugins libapplications.so --plugins libsymbols.so --position top.

Plugin development

See Plugin_development.md

Fork comments

Currently made

• plugins as git submodules
• updated wl-clipboard to 0.8.1 to fix copy-paste issues
• updated to latest version of gtk4 with gtk4-layer-shell
  • Get rid of fulscreen window
  • Scrollable matches
• flat list instead of list of lists to use native navigation and activation handling (yes now it looks like Krunner)
  • On Enter key with entry focus activate first match (currently without selected match highlight)
• plugins
  • applications
    • replaced with peppidesu's repo
  • kidex
    • added prefix
  • randr

    • updated to newer hyprland crate

      it's currently unstable but it's working

  • translate
    • tokio with rt-multi-thread feature instead of rt because of Runtime::new()

TODO

• Seems like that somehing like --plugins libstdin.so don't work as expected
  • If anyrun launched in something like sigle-plugin mode then plugin can request to hide entry or something else... Maybe it can request changing window placement, or specify custom in it's own config (for power-menu or whatever)
• Migrate to gtk4 due to Support for gtk3-rs crates was dropped
  • Down and Up keys should focus from entry to the list and back
  • click to close (seems it will not work comments)
  • Scroll window instead of using max_entries or plugin max_entries (now config field was removed (p.s. I can't do this do to laziness))
    • Get rid of full screen window
      • Anchors from config
      • Margins from config (like there was x and y options)
        • Use RealtiveNum instead
      • Option to place entry down if window is anchored to the bottom
    • Dynamic window size on mathces update wrapping all in scroll if it's too big (abolished to be KISS)
  • Better entry
    • Completion for entry
    • Smooth input
  • Design
    • Need to do something with text overflow.
      • Autoscroll on hover/selection
      • horizontal window scroll (NO)
      • Do something like Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed accumsan elit id...
    • libadwaita? (please share you opinion about it in discussions until I made it)
• Up key on open should insert previous search (If we use Up/Down keys for focus, then it can only save previous state)
  • Config option to save previous search on close and have it on open
  • Handle properly exclusive plugin (seems it will not work comments)
• help matches (maybe based on #[info] macro or adding some special #[help] macto)
  • ? should return some common help or default usage for plugin
  • ? <plugin> should return some plugin usage (maybe based on it's config)
• Select first match by default as it is has default activate
• Interface for plugin to request how to display it (for example to have small clipboard history images)
• [x]] Add something like daemon mode to make launch faster. Instead of loading all libs and stuff every time we need just open/hide window using daemon (comments)
• CI/CD
  • Security audit
    • doesn't even get to the next step
    • fails up because of generational-arena crate as it's unmaintaned. Need to move to something more alive
  • Nix check and build. Thanks a lot @eum3l

TODO-comments

Click to close

click on close outside window seems to be impossible with wayland if not to fake by creating transparent fullscreen window.

Hope it will be some kind reworked in future releases of Wayland+GTK

I hope I'm wrong about this and just couldn't find the correct information. (help is welcome)

Exclusive plugin state

Plugin grabbing exclusivity can implement menu differently from state to state (wm windows or calling some api for example)

So saving exclusive plugin state can be some king of unstable

Daemon mode

Anyrun can be started in daemon mode hidden

It makes launch faster and prevents anyrun from loading all stuff every time

for help how to use it you can call --help flag or help command

anyrun --help  # like that
anyrun help  # or maybe like that
# it works both

Warning

for nixos users I'd recommend not to use it, because of postrunactions that works with copy events.

I cannot realy test it, so If you wanna try it, do it on your own risk.

In any case, whether it works or not, please leave feedback on this on the issue page