Introduction

Terminal Media Launcher is a command line utility to help streamline launching applications and other media. The goal of this program is to provide a fast, minimal, command line frontend with a Unix-like approach to setup and configuration. The program looks for a configuration file listing different groups of media and creates an ncurses menu from which to select from. If a configuration file is found, the program will draw two columns: one for groups, and one for entries. At the bottom of the window, a preview of the command execution is displayed.

Compiling and Running

terminal-media-launcher can be compiled on any system with make, gcc, and the ncurses development library installed. It can be compiled and installed on any Linux distribution, and can also be compiled and run on Microsoft Windows using MinGW (e.g., via MSYS2). To compile and run terminal-media-launcher:

1. Install dependencies.

On Debian and Debian-based systems:

# apt install gcc liblua5.1-0-dev lua5.1 make ncurses-dev pkg-config

On RHEL and RHEL-based systems:

# dnf install gcc lua lua-devel make ncurses-devel

2. Download the latest .tar.gz release
   • The source can also be cloned down from git, but requires additional dependencies to build (autoconf, automake, autoconf-archive). Additionally, you must run $ autoreconf -ivf to generate the configure script.
3. Run the commands below in the directory the repository was cloned into. This will build the binary src/terminal-media-launcher

$ ./configure
$ make

4. To run the program:

$ src/terminal-media-launcher

Note that terminal-media-launcher will not run until you have created a configuration file.

Installation

terminal-media-launcher can be installed by running:

make install

To uninstall these files:

make uninstall

By default, the program and related files are installed with prefix /usr/local, but this prefix can be changed with ./configure --prefix=PREFIX flag (i.e., ./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local

Create Desktop Entry

Installation of a desktop entry can be enabled by passing a flag to the configure script:

./configure --enable-desktop-entry

Setting this flag will install a desktop entry alongside the program when following the installation instructions above

Screenshots

Configuration File

By default, terminal-media-launcher searches in the following order for a configuration file:

Linux

1. $HOME/.config/terminal-media-launcher/config.lua
2. $HOME/.terminal-media-launcher/config.lua

Windows

1. %APPDATA%\terminal-media-launcher\config.lua

A different configuration file location can also be specified with the -c flag:

terminal-media-launcher -c /path/to/config

For Documentation of the configuration file, see terminal-media-launcher-config. For a help message and list of flags, terminal-media-launcher --help. You can also consult the man pages terminal-media-launcher(1) and terminal-media-launcher-config(5)