Egmde was written as an example Mir based shell a long time ago. Before Mir transitioned to being a Wayland compositor. And part of that example was a, rather primitive, app launcher.
Times have changed, and people have been writing application launchers for Wayland based desktops. In particular, I happened upon wofi in the Ubuntu Archive for 21.10:
$ apt show wofi
Package: wofi
Version: 1.2.4-1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/x11
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Sway and related packages team <team+swaywm@tracker.debian.org>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 171 kB
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.33), libcairo2 (>= 1.2.4), libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.59.2), libgtk-3-0 (>= 3.21.4), libpango-1.0-0 (>= 1.14.0), libwayland-client0 (>= 1.9.91)
Homepage: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi
Download-Size: 61.5 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu impish/universe amd64 Packages
Description: application launcher for wlroots based wayland compositors
wofi is an application launcher and menu program for wlroots based wayland
compositors such as sway. It brings support for three built-in modes:
* drun - launch XDG Desktop files
* run - launch executables from $PATH
* dmenu - dmenu-compatabile mode to read lines from stdin
.
Wofi is easily themeable with the help of CSS style sheets.
And that got me wondering if it would work with Mir and, specifically, egmde.
Well, after a few minor adjustments to egmde, it does:
To use wofi with egmde you just need to install wofi and add the following item to the config:
$ sudo apt install wofi
$ cat ~/.config/egmde.config | grep wofi
shell-app-launcher=wofi --show drun --location top_left
I also discovered wofi in the 20.04 archive, but that earlier version doesn’t work with Mir.
Note: the version (151) of egmde with the shell-app-launcher option is currently on the candidate channel:
sudo snap install --classic --candidate egmde
Great work 