spacebanana420/kerolauncher

Configurable cross-platform launcher for games, programs, commands, etc

Kerolauncher

Kerolauncher is a cross-platform launcher that adds a terminal interface for launching games, commands and general programs, as well as using WINE, Lutris and a few emulators, as long as you have them installed. The launcher makes it fast and convenient to launch your programs and games from 1 source while also providing support for backups, custom commands, configuration, and more.

You can turn Kerolauncher into a front-end of any software through the configuration of custom commands.

Current features:

• Native execution of any software
• Launching any command you want
• Launching programs through Wine and Lutris (Unix-like)
• Launching programs with appimage-run or steam-run (NixOS)
• Extensive configuration
• Automatic and manual backups
• Error checking
• Config backup and restoration
• Out-of-the-box handy support for using emulators
• CLI arguments
• Simple file explorer for quick launching
• Interactive menu (terminal user interface)
• High portability without clutter (doesn't write on .config, .local/share, AppData, etc)

Download and how to use

Requirements

• Ruby
  • Interpreter for Kerolauncher
• Wine (optional)
  • running Windows programs on Linux, MacOS, etc
• Lutris (optional, Linux)
  • launcher for Linux
• steam-run and appimage-run (optional, NixOS)
  • Hassle-free launch of appimages and dynamic-linked binaries on NixOS
• xdg-utils (except Windows and MacOS)
  • Present by default in most OSes with a GUI that follows the xdg desktop portal. Uses the desktop's preferred program to open the file in question

Download

Kerolauncher works on most operative systems and architectures, basically the ones supported by Ruby. Linux systems and Windows are officially tested, but MacOS, BSD systems, etc, should also be fine.

Kerolauncher is an interpreted program so it requires the Ruby interpreter to be installed to work (Recommended version 3.0.0 or higher).

Download Kerolauncher from here or from the repository directly (less stable).

Install Ruby (Windows and MacOS)

Install Ruby from the official website and follow the instructions

Install Ruby (Linux, BSD, etc)

Install Ruby from your native package manager

• Debian: apt install ruby
• Arch: pacman -S ruby
• openSUSE: zypper install ruby
• NixOS: Add to your list of packages in your configuration.nix: ruby or whatever is latest (like ruby_3_2)
• FreeBSD: pkg install ruby32 (eventually in the future ruby33, etc)

How to use

Launch Kerolauncher from a terminal with ruby kerolauncher.rb, or just double-click kerolauncher.rb if you are on Windows.

Kerolauncher needs that you configure your games. Open config.rb in the config folder and set up your games.

Configuration

Kerolauncher's configuration is located directly in config.rb, inside the config folder. Configuration for game names, game paths and backup paths is required.

Settings with [] mean that they support multiple entries. Each entry needs to be inside quotation marks and separated by commas, but they can be separated by lines as well, to make it easier to read.

Windows users can ignore everything related to Wine and Lutris

kerolauncher's Issues

xdg-open: stdout and stderr are visible

When opening a file with xdg-open, it summons the preferred program for the file format in question. If this program prints any output, it will overlap Kerolauncher's file explorer output

Improve config.rb

Improve config.rb to be easier to understand and faster to write on. A possibility is to not write it in Ruby and create my own text format for the config

Memory use can also be optimized, since the entire configuration's settings stay in memory until you close Kerolauncher

Major Windows-specific bug

There is a bug that is specific to Windows that could possibly make most functionality of Kerolauncher not work in the "play" section due to how cmd.exe interprets the character '

I don't know if powershell is affected by this

Will fix soon, probably today