Zenkai:
url: Zenkai source code
Zenkai is a fast, lightweight app launcher for Linux written in Zig. It scans .desktop files from standard locations, presents them in a clean searchable list with fuzzy matching(damerau–levenshtein), and lets you launch said apps. It also supports custom menu entries, clipboard-aware URL handling, custom theming and much much more.
Oh we also have a lua plugin system that is super simple to use.
Speaking of theming I’ve included 60+ themes in there which can easily be listed out with --list-themes, I’ve made sure to include some of the most popular editor themes in there and even added some custom ones that are loosely inspired by DBZ since this project’s name is also inspired by DBZ.
From my initial testing the expected RSS is about 50-70MB with the correct optimization flags. “I’ve included the nvidia flags in zenkai.sh”
And the avg startup time for the launcher is somewhere between 90-160ms with icons and 30-50ms without icons.
Why zenkai?
I like DBZ and since this is a zig project I felt like naming it something that starts with “Z” was appropriate which also inspired me to draw from DBZ.
Dependencies
I feel like I have to shout out two amazing projects that helped me achieve this
- libqt6zig: possibly the most important part since it allowed me to use Qt. Great project, well maintained and fairly easy to use.
- ziglua: at first I wanted to embed lua myself since I have a fair bit of experience doing that, but that proved to be too much of a side project so I decided to go with zlua, it was effortless and saved me a bunch of work.
Supported Zig versions
Supports zig 0.16