Catapult Launcher

Catapult is an app launcher for Linux. It allows you to easily launch apps, open files and do basic calculations with a keyboard-driven user interface. Custom plugins and themes can be loaded dynamically.

Catapult is Free Software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), see the file COPYING for details. Small parts of the code have been adapted from Ulauncher, likewise GPL. These are indicated file-wise in the license headers of individual files.

Installing

Packages

• Arch Linux

Source

Catapult requires the following.

On Debian/Ubuntu you can install these with the following command.

sudo apt install gettext \
                 gir1.2-glib-2.0 \
                 gir1.2-gtk-4.0 \
                 gir1.2-pango-1.0 \
                 libglib2.0-bin \
                 python3 \
                 python3-dev \
                 python3-gi \
                 qalc

Then, to install Catapult, run commands

make PREFIX=/usr/local build
sudo make PREFIX=/usr/local install

Documentation

Keybinding to Activate Catapult

Catapult cannot do a global activation keybinding for you, instead you need to do it yourself in your desktop/distro settings. Catapult is a single-instance app, so executing catapult will start a new instance if not yet running or else activate the existing instance. So, that is the command you can bind to your key of choice.

• GNOME

Window Position on Screen

Catapult cannot position its own window on your screen, which means that it will be positioned wherever your window manager defaults to or considers appropriate. You can configure your window manager to center all new windows by default, which should center the Catapult window too (at least horizontally, vertically the window height changes along with the search results).

• GNOME: gsettings set org.gnome.mutter center-new-windows true

Starting Automatically

If you did a keybinding as above running command catapult, you shouldn't need to pre-start Catapult in the background, it will simply start the first time you need it. If, however, you find the initial startup slow (maybe indexing a lot of files), you can use tools provided by your desktop/distro to set Catapult to start automatically already when you log in to your desktop. To start in the background, use command catapult --hide.

• GNOME
• Ubuntu

Customizing the Theme

You can override parts of the theme by editing ~/.config/catapult/user.css, a file which is created the first time you start Catapult. You can edit the file while Catapult is running and use :reload-theme in Catapult to apply the changes.

For example, to use the GNOME default font (Cantarell) for everything, you can use

.catapult-input-entry {
  font-family: "Cantarell", sans-serif;
}

.catapult-search-result-title {
  font-family: "Cantarell", sans-serif;
}

.catapult-search-result-description {
  font-family: "Cantarell", sans-serif;
}

Or, to use Ubuntu orange as the selection color, try

@define-color selected-bg-color #e95420;

Developers

• Writing Plugins
• Writing Themes