marathon

marathon is a minimal shell-based launcher for Linux/X that tries to be smart about running or focusing apps. When calling marathon application,

• If application is not running, marathon will run it.
• Else marathon will just focus application

That way, after binding your favorite apps to a few easily-accessible OS global keyboard shortcuts, you can access them with a single keypress and forget about alt-tabbing or clicking on stuff in your dock / window list.

Flags:

• --toggle will emulate the Quake terminal-like behavior of minimizing already-focused windows. (By default, marathon leave them untouched.)

• --ignore-args-on-focus will ignore command arguments when focusing (e.g. --incognito in marathon google-chrome --incognito) while still passing them on initial run.

  • This is useful for applications who use a runner or spawn other processes, making ineffective post-exec searching for the fully-qualified command.
  • This is not what you want if the process you want to focus needs arguments to be uniquely identified (e.g. gvim -S work).

Installation

• Mac OSX is not supported, sorry (due to depending on X11 utilities). But rejoice, you'll be well served with Automator or Alfred, see for example this guide

• Linux:

  1. X is required, as there is currently no equivalent to wmctrl and xdotool under Wayland. You'll have to disable Wayland.
  2. Install wmctrl and xdotool from your package manager.
  3. Drop marathon somewhere in your $PATH.
  4. Bind marathon command (optionally adding flags) to a keyboard shortcut:
     • GNOME → Settings → Keyboard section → Shortcut tab → Custom Shortcuts. Mine look like:
       
     • LXDE → your lxde-rc.xml

Support, license, contact

Bug Reports and Pull Requests are welcome.

Licensed under the MIT license, 2012-2016, Ronan Jouchet / @ronjouch