sgflow is a launcher application targetting the Sway window manager. It
is similar to applications such as dmenu and rofi.
sgflow is intended to be usable by any person who needs a launcher for their
Sway desktop. However, it will also include optional (via compilation and
configuration) features specifically for users of Subgraph Citadel -- namely
features to support the paradigms of Citadel such as realms.
It may also work in other window managers that are based on wlroots though
it is not designed to nor has this been tested. It requires some Wayland
protocol extensions that are exclusive to wlroots.
The main difference between sgflow and other launchers that work in Sway is
that it is a Wayland application that renders itself via Wayland as an overlay
onto a layer surface. Some other launchers are essentially X11 applications
that are displayed along-side other applications and so they don't feel like
they are part of the desktop.
sgflow is modelled after the applications overview in GNOME. It uses the
same back-end functions to find and launch .desktop files. It also provides
some of the same search features -- such as searching by desktop application
category, etc. But it does not support search providers or user-customizable
searches/launch actions.
It is implemented as a GTK application that is set up to render on a layer
surface (thanks to Waybar for this inspiration).
Currently, sgflow is written in C. This was not my first choice. It will
be re-written in Rust once the wlroots-rs bindings support layer shells.
Assuming that the required libraries are installed, run the following commands
to build sgflow:
$ meson build
$ ninja -C build