yappla

About

yappla is a small, fast GTK4 launcher for Linux written in Rust using Relm4. It provides a minimal, keyboard-driven UI for searching and launching items in different "modes" (applications, echoing stdin). The app is lightweight, supports theming using CSS, and uses fuzzy search to rank results.

Features

• Multiple modes:
  • apps — discover and launch .desktop applications (parses XDG application directories)
  • echo — read lines from stdin and present them as selectable entries
• Fuzzy search using strsim (Jaro–Winkler and normalized Levenshtein)
• Simple keyboard navigation (arrow keys, Enter, Escape)
• Themable via CSS (yappla.css, or fallback bundled CSS)
• Planned: json mode — read structured JSON from stdin to present custom items (not implemented yet)
• Planned: mapping non-English symbols to English equivalents during search to improve matching for users with several keyboard layouts (not implemented yet)

Requirements

• Rust toolchain
• GTK4 development libraries available on your platform

Build

Build release binary with Cargo:

cargo build --release -p yappla

Run examples

• Run the apps mode (search installed desktop apps):

yappla apps

• Run the echo mode — feed lines on stdin and then search/select them:

printf "first\nsecond\nthird\n" | yappla echo

Theming / configuration

yappla tries to load CSS in this order:

1. $HOME/.config/yappla/yappla.css
2. ./yappla.css (in the current working directory)
3. Built-in fallback theme.css included in the binary

A default theme file is included as yappla/theme.css. To override appearance, create the configuration file in your home config directory above or drop a yappla.css next to the binary when running.

Keyboard shortcuts

• Escape — exit
• Up / Down — move selection
• Enter — run the selected item
• Typing in the entry updates the search query