Latest News

New website

18 Sep 2022

xstarter has a new website that you can see right now! It's likely not the final version yet, so you can expect a few more updates.

Version 0.8.2 released

13 Sep 2022

Version 0.8.2 is a maintenance release. The main change is removal of Glib as a dependency which I wanted to remove as it's pretty heavy. Check it out on Github.

New version of xstarter (v0.8.1) was released today

25 May 2020

It’s a tiny release but it contains necessary fixes for xstarter to compile with gcc 10. Check it out on Github.

Emacs interface available for xstarter!

28 Aug 2018

It uses Helm interface that many Emacs users are familiar with. It loads a list of installed applications and lets a user select one to launch. It also records recently open programs and shows them on top.

See github page for installation instructions!

New version of xstarter (v0.8.0) was released today.

27 Aug 2018

Main intention of this release was to enable xstarter to work with external programs. I want to be able to use xstarter via Emacs and I’m working on a small package that will handle that. With this release xstarter is able to print a list of programs that it stored in cache (it can be tested by running xstarter -P). External applications can use it load the list of available programs and show it to users. In order to start a program, e.g. Firefox, use command xstarter -e firefox. It can be used on its own to start and detach applications from terminal as well by other software.

In this release I’ve also fixed an interesting bug that broke xstarter if it was built without compiler optimisation. I wrote about that bug on my blog.

Version 0.7.0 released

26 Mar 2018

New version of xstarter is available (v0.7.0). It adds one useful feature: you can now provide arguments to the application. It works for GUI and terminal programs alike. This allows to start a program like this: surf gnu.org (GUI) or e.g. emacs -nw -Q.

How to use it?

If the number of search results is equal to 1, you can provide arguments the selected application should be started with, e.g. surf gnu.org. You can provide multiple arguments, e.g. emacs -nw -Q. You can select the application you want to provide arguments for by pressing Tab key This feature works both with GUI (press Enter to start) and terminal applications (press C-o to start)