Goal

LaunchMenu is an free, open source, cross-platform utility application which brings utilities (applets) to your fingertips. It intends to increase your productivity through it's keyboard-centric design, meanwhile also being extremely customisable with advanced theming and applet settings. The application is styled similar to that of Spotlight for Mac, however it allows for 3rd party applets to be built and installed, further increasing your productivity in any aspect of life.

LaunchMenu runs in the background, and launches when the user presses the "open LaunchMenu" hotkey (⌘ + space/⊞ + space by default).

introduction.mp4

Contact us if you want to contribute to the project.

For an extensive list of features please see the LaunchMenu website. For an extensive list of built-in applets see the applets section of the website.

3rd party Applets / LaunchMenu API

LaunchMenu offers a free and flexible API, which allows 3rd party developers to extend the application's functionality to any experience they desire. The API primarily targets extensibility via TypeScript and React.

export const info = {
    name: "HelloWorld",
    description: "A minimal example applet",
    version: "0.0.0",
    icon: <img width={30} src={Path.join(__dirname, "..", "images", "icon.png")} />,
};

export const settings = createSettings({
    version: "0.0.0",
    settings: () =>
        createSettingsFolder({
            ...info,
            children: {
                username: createStringSetting({name: "Username", init: "Bob"}),
            },
        }),
});

const items = [
    createStandardMenuItem({
        name: "Hello world",
        onExecute: ({context}) =>
            alert(`Hello ${context.settings.get(settings).username.get()}!`),
    }),
];

export default declare({
    info,
    settings,
    search: async (query, hook) => ({children: searchAction.get(items)}),
});

For more information about development of applets in LaunchMenu please see the LaunchMenu development website.

Contribution

As mentioned several times already, LaunchMenu is fully open-source! We welcome any contributions to the project, especially third party applets. In case you want to contribute to our official repository, we do recommend discussing your ideas with us first. This prevents you from investing a lot of time into something that doesn't line up with our long term vision. That said, we're open to most ideas, and welcome all discussions! So don't hesitate to join the community, both as developer or as user, at one of the following links:

Community links

• Github
• Element

Project structure

This repository is a mono-repo and contains several packages. The packages directory has the following structure:

• applets
  • Notes applet
  • Dictionary applet
  • etc.
• core
• core-applets
  • settings manager
  • applet manager
  • etc.
• dev-tools
  • build-tools
  • hmr
• launcher

The applets directory is rather self-explanatory: it contains all official utility applets. The core-applets directory may be a bit more confusing. This too contains applets for LaunchMenu, but so called 'core-applets'. These are applets that wouldn't be useful as standalone programs, but are useful within LaunchMenu. For instance having a stand-alone 'settings' program wouldn't be useful (settings for what??) while having a stand-alone 'dictionary' program is still useful.

The launcher directory contains the launcher package. This is something that takes care of LaunchMenu (LM) installation and launching (similar to e.g. the MineCraft launcher). In the future auto-update code will also be added to this, to take care of updating LaunchMenu when new release come out.

The dev-tools directory contains any code that's useful during development. The build-tools package provides a command-line utility and can be used for building LM during development. The hmr can be used within code to allow for Hot Module Reloading.

Finally we have the most important package of them all: core. This contains the main structure of LaunchMenu and utilities that can be used by applets. In the future we may want to split-off these utilities a bit further in separate dedicated packages, but for now they are all part of core.

Development

To install all dependencies, simply run yarn in the root of the repository. This will install all dependencies, link the packages, and perform an initial build of all packages.

When you're working on either the core of LM or an applet, run yarn dev within packages/core. This will start the core of LM, launching the program.

Then in the case of working on an applet, simply run yarn dev again, but now within the directory of the applet you're working on. HMR will automatically take care of reloading your applet in the running LM instance when any changes occur. Do notice however that you may need to exit and open any menus of your applet again to see the changes.