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OpenVoiceOS / ovos-skill-application-launcher

launch applications by voice
Apache License 2.0
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Application Launcher

Application Launcher

NOTE: this skill only works on Linux desktop environments!

About

Launch applications on the Linux desktop

The standard directories will be scanned for .desktop files, application names and execution commands will be parsed from there

Scanned folders:

Examples

Multiple instances of same Application

In Wayland systems window control is not available and apps are closed exclusively by terminating running processes

In X systems, the launcher prioritizes closing windows over terminating processes if wmctrl is available in your system

This provides a more granular control, allowing multiple instances of applications (such as several Firefox windows) to be managed individually. Even if they share the same PID

If multiple processes with different PIDs match a specific application, it will only close the most recent one by default. However, users can opt for the old behavior, which allows the option to kill all matching processes.

Configuration via settings.json

To customize the behavior of the Application Launcher skill, you can modify the following options in the settings.json file:

Option Type Default Value Description
aliases Dict[str, List[str]] {"kcalc": ["calculator"]} Defines application aliases. Use application names from the .desktop file as keys and a list of speech-friendly names as values.
user_commands Dict[str, str] {} User-defined application commands. Map application names to their corresponding bash commands.
thresh float 0.85 The threshold for string matching. Lower values will allow more lenient matches for application names.
skip_categories List[str] ["Settings", "ConsoleOnly", "Building"] Categories in desktop files that exclude application from being considered.
skip_keywords List[str] [] Keywords in desktop files that exclude application from being considered.
target_categories List[str] [] Categories in desktop files required for application to be considered.
target_keywords List[str] [] Keywords in desktop files required for application to be considered.
blacklist List[str] [] List of applications to ignore during scanning (application names from the .desktop file).
require_icon bool True If set to True, only include applications that have an icon defined in their .desktop file.
require_categories bool True If set to True, only include applications that have at least one category defined in their .desktop file.
terminate_all bool False If True, will terminate all matching processes when closing applications.
shell bool False If True, allows commands to be executed in a shell environment.
disable_window_manager bool False If True, ignores wmctl and exclusively uses running processes for managing apps

eg.

{
  "aliases": {
    "kcalc": ["calculator"]
  },
  "thresh": 0.85,
  "skip_categories": ["Settings", "ConsoleOnly", "Building"],
  "terminate_all": true
}

Category

Productivity

Tags

desktop

desktop-launch

desktop-launcher