Installation and Launching

Installing

Arch

yay -S walker

// for example
yay -S elephant elephant-desktopapplications

Will install a basic OOTB Walker+Elephant setup.

Fedora

sudo dnf copr enable errornointernet/walker
sudo dnf install walker
sudo dnf install elephant

openSuse Tumbleweed

# Dependencies
sudo zypper install git cargo gtk4-devel gtk4-layer-shell-devel libpoppler-glib-devel protobuf-devel cairo-devel go make

# Walker
git clone https://github.com/abenz1267/walker.git ~/Downloads/walker
cd ~/Downloads/walker
sudo make install

# Elephant
git clone https://github.com/abenz1267/elephant ~/Downloads/elephant
cd ~/Downloads/elephant
sudo make install

# Provider desktopapplications
cd ~/Downloads/elephant/internal/providers/desktopapplications
sudo make install

# Provider menus
cd ~/Downloads/elephant/internal/providers/menus
sudo make install

# Provider files
cd ~/Downloads/elephant/internal/providers/files
sudo make install

Launching

Elephant has to be running in order for Walker to function.

Starting Elephant is best done as a user-service: you can use elephant service enable to generate a systemd user-level service. It will install and enable it, but won't start it. systemctl --user start elephant.service in order to start it without rebooting. When Elephant is running, you can simply launch Walker with walker! Done.

Optimizing startup time

Since Walker is based on GTK4, it is by nature slow to startup. A lot of things have to be done each time you open it ⇒ slow. This can be optimized, by keeping a Walker instance running with walker --gapplication-service This way everything required in order to launch Walker (parsing config, setting up UI etc) is only done once. Furthermore, you can make Walker popup via a socket call, f.e. nc -U /run/user/1000/walker/walker.sock . This is further improve the time till Walker appears on your screen, by avoiding any GTK4 cmdline parsing. So this can be used as a faster alternative to simply calling walker.