You’re right I sbould have included that in the question. I’m on Hyprland with Wayland so there are quite a few choices. I mentioned rofi (rofi-wayland) and wofi because I can see that they are both options here.

I might be missing something here but I don’t know how other launchers could possibly make this a simpler process.

Shortcuts to launch an app directly in example. So my keyboard becomes my launcher.

I use bunch of different tools, including KRunner (on KDE) and previously Rofi. These type name and search tools for launching an app have the problem that you need to remember what name the tool was. For programs I use often this is not an issue, but not all applications have names good to remember and not all of them are used often. The associated description helps, but sometimes I don’t know what words to type.

Therefore I “need” the app menu with categories and favorites, to navigate with the mouse through. And the most used applications are usually assigned to a shortcut and my panel on the top. In short I use mostly all of these techniques as an application launcher (in that order):

1. favorites on panel and my keyboard shortcuts
2. app menu with categories, navigating with mouse
3. run tool to search for app name and description (also integrated into the app menu)
4. additional helper scripts to search and launch programs in the terminal

Edit: Forgot to mention that some of the launchers I use are custom made scripts for the terminal.

I also use krunner but unless I’ve misconfigured it, I wouldn’t call it fast (and it freezes a lot since it runs in the background).

Compared to when I used rofi on hyprland (which was really fast). I’m back on KDE cause of the hyprland toxicity debacle, and honesty the only thing that isn’t fast, customizable, and reliable is the app runner.

Krunner also has a weird quirk where as it loads entries, it will change the currently selected option so when you hit Enter, it will actually not execute the one you want, but instead run “Install <random package from fuzzy search>”

Talking out loud I should probably bind alt+space to back to rofi or try Fuzzel or something

Yep I 100% recommend Fuzzel too !

I’ve been looking for something for Wayland, I’ll give this a go, thank you.

• 5 Best App Launchers for Ubuntu & Linux Mint

“The default application launcher in Ubuntu is provided by GNOME Shell, offering a full-screen grid of icons — but it isn’t to everyone’s tastes.”

that’s an extreme and impressive solution

I like these self made scripts. Some ideas to improve this: a) instead ls, use find command if you want use its output as input in another program (will yield fullpath too), b) fzf has a preview functionality, which I like a lot to use when it comes to directories or script files. As for the run command, I’m not sure why you use xargs and what i3-msg is needed for. Here is an alternative way.

(Edit: I always forget that beehaw will convert my ampersand to &. Have this in mind if you read the below code.)

bash -c 'cd "${HOME}/.local/bin"; path="$(find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable -printf "%f\n" | fzf --preview "cat {}")" && "${path}"'

below same command in a bit more readable standalone script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
cd "${HOME}/.local/bin" || exit 1
path="$( \
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable -printf "%f\n" | \
    fzf --preview "cat {}" \
)" && "${path}"

The biggest problem with fzf is, that scripts that need an argument are not covered here. One could either use the input string from fzf as arguments or like that, or an optional input after fzf selection.