nwg-drawer

This application is a part of the nwg-shell project.

Contributing: please read the general contributing rules for the nwg-shell project.

Nwg-drawer is a golang replacement to the nwggrid command (a part of nwg-launchers). It's being developed with sway in mind, but should also work with other wlroots-based Wayland compositors. X Window System is not officially supported, but you should be able to use the drawer on some floating window managers (tested on Openbox).

The nwg-drawer command displays the application grid. The search entry allows to look for installed applications, and for files in XDG user directories. The grid view may also be filtered by categories.

You may pin applications by right-clicking them. Pinned items will appear above the application grid. Right-click a pinned item to unpin it. The pinned items cache is shared with nwg-menu and nwggrid.

see on YouTube

To close the window w/o running a program, you may use Esc key, or right-click the window next to the icons.

v0.2.x note

Placing config files in the nwg-panel config directory was a mistake, sorry. The 0.2.0 version migrates them to ~/.config/nwg-drawer.
From now on you may run the program residently, which should speed it up (but also occupy some resources!). See "Running" below.

Installation

Dependencies

go >=1.20 (just to build)
gtk3
gtk-layer-shell
xdg-utils

Optional (recommended):

thunar
foot

You may use another file manager and terminal emulator (see command line arguments), but mentioned above have been confirmed to work well with the program. Also see Files below.

Steps

Clone the repository, cd into it.
Install necessary golang libraries with make get.
make build
sudo make install

Command line arguments

$ nwg-drawer -h
Usage of nwg-drawer:
  -c uint
    	number of Columns (default 6)
  -d	Turn on Debug messages
  -fm string
    	File Manager (default "thunar")
  -fscol uint
    	File Search result COLumns (default 2)
  -fslen int
    	File Search name LENgth Limit (default 80)
  -ft
    	Force Theme for libadwaita apps, by adding 'GTK_THEME=<default-gtk-theme>' env var
  -g string
    	GTK theme name
  -i string
    	GTK icon theme name
  -is int
    	Icon Size (default 64)
  -k	set GTK layer shell Keyboard interactivity to 'on-demand' mode
  -lang string
    	force lang, e.g. "en", "pl"
  -mb int
    	Margin Bottom
  -ml int
    	Margin Left
  -mr int
    	Margin Right
  -mt int
    	Margin Top
  -nocats
    	Disable filtering by category
  -nofs
    	Disable file search
  -o string
    	name of the Output to display the drawer on (sway only)
  -ovl
    	use OVerLay layer
  -r	Leave the program resident in memory
  -s string
    	Styling: css file name (default "drawer.css")
  -spacing uint
    	icon spacing (default 20)
  -term string
    	Terminal emulator (default "foot")
  -v	display Version information

NOTE: the $TERM environment variable overrides the -term argument if defined.

Running

Since v0.2.x you may use the drawer in two ways:

Simply run the nwg-drawer command, by adding a key binding to your sway config file, e.g.:

bindsym Mod1+F1 exec nwg-drawer

Run a resident instance on startup, and use the nwg-drawer command to show the window, e.g.:

exec_always nwg-drawer -r
bindsym Mod1+F1 exec nwg-drawer

The second line does nothing but pkill -USR1 nwg-drawer, so you may just use this command instead. Actually this should be a little bit faster.

Running a resident instance should speed up use of the drawer significantly. Pay attention to the fact, that you need to pkill -f nwg-drawer and reload sway to apply any new arguments!

Logging

In case you encounter an issue, you may need debug messages. If you use the resident instance, you'll see nothing in the terminal. Please edit your sway config file:

exec nwg-drawer -r -d 2> ~/drawer.log

exit sway, launch it again and include the drawer.log content in the GitHub issue. Do not use exec_always here: it'll destroy the log file content on sway reload.

Styling

Edit ~/.config/nwg-drawer/drawer.css to your taste.

Files

When the search phrase is at least 3 characters long, your XDG user directories are being searched.

Use the left mouse button to open a file with the xdg-open command. As configuring file associations for it is PITA, you may override them, by creating the ~/.config/nwg-panel/preferred-apps.json file with your own definitions.

Sample `preferred-apps.json` file content

{
  "\\.pdf$": "atril",
  "\\.svg$": "inkscape",
  "\\.(jpg|png|tiff|gif)$": "feh",
  "\\.(mp3|ogg|flac|wav|wma)$": "audacious",
  "\\.(avi|mp4|mkv|mov|wav)$": "mpv",
  "\\.(doc|docx|xls|xlsx)$": "libreoffice"
}

Use the right mouse button to open the file with your file manager (see -fm argument). The result depends on the file manager you use.

thunar will open the file location
pcmanfm will open the file with its associated program
caja won't open anything, except for directories

I've noy yet tried other file managers.

File search exclusions

You may want to exclude some paths inside your XDG user directories from searching. If so, define exclusions in the ~/.config/nwg-panel/excluded-dirs file, e.g. like this:

# exclude all paths containing 'node_modules'
node_modules

Credits

This program uses some great libraries:

gotk3 Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Conformal Systems LLC, Copyright (c) 2015-2018 gotk3 contributors
gotk3-layershell by @dlasky - many thanks for writing this software, and for patience with my requests!

Schuldkroete/nwg-drawer