Àwárí (experimental)

Awari is a Wayland launcher. Built with GPUI and fff search.

By separating a tiny, GPU-free background daemon from a warm GPU overlay, Awari pops onto your screen in an unnoticeable instant while maintaining a lean idle footprint. For ultra-low-spec hardware, it can easily drop down to a pure on-demand mode to free up every megabyte of RAM.

Screenshots

More demos

Themes

Verdant	Ember	Paper
Tokyo Night	Mono	Nord

Views

Apps category

Files category

Motivation

Most launchers fork a search tool every keystroke (fd, fzf, rg) or spin up a web runtime just to draw a box, with files as an afterthought. Àwárí runs file search in-process via fff-search and ranks windows, apps, and files together, so there's no subprocess per character and you get whichever you meant. A GPU-free shell opens the overlay with a socket message; by default it's kept alive (hidden) for instant re-opens, or torn down with keep-alive = false / --no-keep-alive for the leanest idle footprint (the interface rebuilds on the next open).

Usage

Bind a key to awari toggle-launcher and press it to open. Type to filter; the top match stays selected. Enter activates and closes; Escape or a background click dismisses; Up/Down move the selection. Tab ghost-completes the selected match (or fills the box); Shift+Up/Down recall past queries. Alt+Enter opens a per-row menu (Open, Show in Folder, Copy Path, Run in Terminal, Run).

Query modes:

• Path-shaped (~, /, ., or contains /) browses the filesystem; *.pdf, !node_modules/ constrain, ../ goes up.
• o:<path> lists a path's entries as you type.
• r:<regex> filters files by regex.
• > <command> runs a shell command in a terminal.
• An arithmetic query shows its result; Enter copies it.

Category chips (All, Apps, Files, Commands, Windows) narrow the source.

Commands

The same binary doubles as its own daemon control. Run from a shell or bind any of them to a key:

• awari toggle-launcher — show/hide the overlay.
• awari open-launcher / awari close-launcher — explicit open or close.
• awari restart — stop the GUI and re-exec the shell daemon so a changed config.kdl takes effect (the hidden overlay is re-spawned too). If no daemon is running (e.g. drop mode), it simply starts one.
• awari ping — exits 0 when the daemon is up; useful for health checks.

Config is read at daemon start — there is no hot reload — so edits (including keep-alive) apply on the next awari restart or daemon start.

Features

• Lightweight: GPU-free background daemon; overlay kept alive hidden for instant re-opens, or dropped entirely for the leanest idle footprint.
• In-process search: fff-search ranks by frecency with no per-keystroke subprocess; matchq scores windows/apps without per-keystroke allocation. IPC read-to-damage is under 2 ms p99.
• Bounded: LRU-capped per-directory indexes; idle CPU ~0 (sustained >1% is a bug).
• One suggestion: inline ghost-text completion; full alternates only on ↓.
• Wayland-native: one binary for any Wayland compositor. Overlay uses wlr-layer-shell (niri, Hyprland, sway, river, labwc); on GNOME/Mutter it falls back to a normal window for apps/files/commands.
• Unified results: windows (focus), apps (.desktop), and files in one fuzzy/frecency list. Apps always indexed; files and windows toggleable.
• Query power: > commands, o:<path> browse, r:<regex>, arithmetic, path navigation with constraints.
• Theming: KDL hex tokens (no CSS/fetch); ten presets, per-token overrides, aliases (select, hover/surface, fg, muted, faint); bundled JetBrains Mono typeface by default (font "default" restores the system UI font), font-size in px.
• Action menu, category chips, calculator, monitor-aware, lockfiles hidden.

Build

Linux + Wayland compositor (best on niri, Hyprland, sway, river, labwc via wlr-layer-shell; GNOME/Mutter falls back to a window).

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install libwayland-dev libegl-dev pkg-config
# Fedora
sudo dnf install wayland-devel mesa-libEGL-devel

cargo test
cargo run -p awari
awari ping

Install

Distribution	Install
Fedora 43 / 44 / rawhide	sudo dnf copr enable borngraced/awari sudo dnf install awari
Debian / Ubuntu	sudo add-apt-repository ppa:borngraced/awari sudo apt install awari PPA coming soon
Arch	sudo pacman -U awari-0.1.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
Any Linux	Prebuilt .deb, .rpm, Arch package and raw tarballs on releases

awari isn't on crates.io because it depends on a vendored, patched GPUI under .third_party/zed (a local [patch] can't be published). Install from git:

cargo install --git https://github.com/borngraced/awari awari

This builds GPUI from source, so the Build dev libraries are required. Then run it as a background service and bind a key.

systemctl --user enable --now ~/.config/systemd/user/awari.service

niri (~/.config/niri/config.kdl):

spawn-at-startup "awari"
binds {
    Mod+D { spawn "awari" "toggle-launcher"; }
}

Hyprland (~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf):

exec-once = awari
bind = SUPER, D, exec, awari toggle-launcher

GNOME / KDE / other desktop shells: run awari as a systemd user service so it starts with your graphical session. Create the unit manually, then register and enable it:

# ~/.config/systemd/user/awari.service
[Unit]
Description=Awari Wayland launcher
PartOf=graphical-session.target
After=graphical-session.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=%h/.cargo/bin/awari
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=1

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical-session.target

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now awari.service

enable --now starts it now and on every login. The unit targets graphical-session.target, which both GNOME and KDE start. awari must run under your user session (not root) — it's a Wayland client, so WAYLAND_DISPLAY / XDG_RUNTIME_DIR must be available.

Configuration

KDL at ~/.config/awari/config.kdl. Unknown keys ignored; no exec/scripts/shell interpolation; every block/token optional. Copy-pasteable full file: contrib/config.kdl.

theme {
  name "catppuccin"            // presets: awari (default) · ash · ember · verdant
                               //          paper · mono · nord · tokyonight · catppuccin · gruvbox
  // font "Inter"             // default is the bundled JetBrains Mono; any fontdb family
  //                          // override; "default"/"" = GPUI system UI font
  // font-size 14             // px, clamped to 8..=64
  accent      "#cba6f7"       // = select
  accent-dim  "#cba6f733"
  bg          "#11111b"
  panel       "#1e1e2e"
  raise       "#313244"       // = hover = surface
  border      "#45475a"
  text        "#cdd6f4"       // = fg
  text-dim    "#a6adc8"       // = muted
  text-faint  "#9399b2"       // = faint
  scrim       "#08080ce6"
}

files {
  roots "~/Documents" "~/Downloads" "~/code"   // omit/empty = XDG user dirs
  index_lockfiles false                        // show Cargo.lock, *.lock, …
  regex           false                        // file queries as regex (r: prefix forces it)
  max-results     50                           // max file rows shown
}

fff {
  watch true             // background file watcher
  fs-root-scanning true  // allow indexing the filesystem root
  mmap-cache false       // mmap pre-warm for top-frecency files
  content-indexing false // content index for content-aware filtering
  follow-symlinks false  // index through symbolic links
}

sources {
  windows true
  files   true
}

keep-alive true              // GPU overlay stays in memory between uses (default); false = exits on dismiss
// apps is always indexed and cannot be disabled

motion {
  reduced     false            // disable animations
  duration-ms 140              // open/close length, clamped to 0..=1000
}

Colors are hex: #RGB, #RRGGBB, or #RRGGBBAA. In place of the canonical token names you can also use these aliases:

Alias	Sets
select	accent-dim
hover, surface	raise
fg	text
muted	text-dim
faint	text-faint