lunchbar

README

Lunchbar

VERY EARLY POC - NOT READY YET

Lunchbar is an xbar clone with some goals:

• Cross-platform: Mac, Linux and Windows.
• Focused on sharing plugins: easy to install and maintain plugins across a team

The main point of this project is to be able to easily share plugins and tools between team-mates, even if they're not using the same Operating System, and even if they haven't got the same stuff installed.

Lunchbar includes its sibling project, lunchbox, to provide batteries-included support for cross-platform plugins.

Comparison

What are the similarities and differences between xbar and lunchbar?

lunchbar is in very early stages, but this should cover the conceptual differences & similarities...

Commonality

• they're both written in go.
• The plugin design and format is the same.
  • I plan to add some metadata tags, but that's all (I think).
  • Anything beyond that, I'll try to upstream to xbar. One PR so far.
• lunchbar depends on xbar's pkg/plugin package, including the emoji support.
  • So, the look and feel is very similar. On Mac at least.

Some differences from xbar

• Cross-platform from the outset.
  • Use getlantern/systray instead of wails.
    • xbar's UI library, Wails, doesn't currently support Windows or Linux. It could take a while before it gets implemented, and even then there are some challenges....
  • There are peculiar challenges when developing a cross-platform system tray.
    • OS differences - e.g. Windows doesn't show text. Workarounds for using/generating icons.
  • Each plugin runs in its own process (this is forced by a limitation of systray). IPC communications between main app and plugin app.
• Reduced feature set.
  • No plugin browser or other UI (for the time being)
  • Some features are hard to implement in a cross-platform way.
    • icons only for some platforms. The first item shows what would normally be in the list.
    • IPC - lunchbar uses getlantern/systray instead of wails. This is already cross-platform, but it's different... only one systray icon per process. So, this tool launches one process per icon.
• Easier sharing amongst teams:
• Bundled interpreter(s) for easy installation of cross-platform plugins. elvish first.
• TODO: set up 'alternate repositories'
• TODO: support per-plugin ENV variables via dotenv files.
• Little differences:
  • The 'lunchbar menu' is at the top

Hopes and dreams

• Support for easily building cross-platform plugins in bash/elvish/go/etc
• OS tagging for plugins.
• Some mechanism to discover and install plugins. Possibly similar to the xbar wasy. Not sure.
• Some form of automated ENV management (.env files) with some encryption support.

Installation

For now, it's not pre-packaged.

Please install lunchbar using the Go compiler.

1. Check getlantern/systray's docs for installing pre-requisites. i.e. on Linux, install something like this: sudo apt-get install gcc libgtk-3-dev libappindicator3-dev

2. Windows ONLY (or any Linux variant which doesn't support text in systray menu items):

   • users should fetch emoji to support icons ... https://github.com/WebpageFX/emoji-cheat-sheet.com
   • copy the png files directly into emoji/ subdirectory of lunchbar. These will get bundled into lunchbar during compilation step.

3. Install lunchbar using Go (tested on 1.17):

   go install github.com/laher/lunchbar@latest

4. Run lunchbar (assuming that your $GOPATH/bin is on your $PATH)

   lunchbar

5. Run lunchbar with a single plugin (plugins should be any executable located in $HOME/.config/lunchbar/plugins/)

   lunchbar myplugin.sh

Progress

M1

Focus of M1 is to get something usable working across OSes ...

• parse and handle plugin output
  • href, shell, terminal[mac]
• 2 modes - supervisor and runner
  • IPC
• Quit
• Refreshing
  • Refresh button
  • Refresh on timer
  • Refresh all (IPC)
• Cross platform work
  • Mac support
  • Support icon instead of text. Basic.
  • Verify
    • Test on Linux
    • Test on Windows
• Error handling
  • Show a sample when no plugins found
  • React to killed process
• Testing
  • Happy Path Tests
  • Error path tests

M2

M2 is to add some convenience features ahead of plugin management

• Build automation (go-releaser cross compilation?)!
• .env files
  • encrypted keys
• Plugin-writing help
  • Bundled-elvish support
  • Cross-platform convenience methods
  • Guides

M3

M3 is all about plugin repo and managing compatibility with xbar plugins

• Sample 'services'
• Samples of some cross-platform [elvish] scripts
  • docker-compose
  • kube
  • weather
  • finance