Several small mods, and a question about development

[spencerflagg]

Great app! As an unhappy maximalist, I've been looking for a good minimalist launcher to tidy up my phone.
I have a few changes that I'd love to make, or see made, before I can use it full time.

I'd love to fork the project and try some things out. How easy do you think it would be for a Dart / Kotlin novice (such as myself) to accomplish the following?

• allow search engine customization
• allow phone, chat, and camera buttons to direct to different apps
• add 3 more app slots

I very much appreciate the minimalist aesthetic, and I wouldn't want to disrupt it. That said, I don't use the default Google version of any of these apps, and I imagine many other open-source fans also prefer to avoid Google.

[github-actions]

Autogenerated branch name:

feature/several-small-mods-and-a-question-about-development

[nivisi]

@spencerflagg hello and welcome! Thank you very much for the feedback, I'm pleased that you find this app useful 🙂

1. Could be tricky. Currently we simply open the google search. I have ideas for replacing it with custom search that would look for the apps (like in the bottom sheet atm), your notes etc.

   Answering your question: depending on what you'd like to achieve. If you want similar thing to google search — it only will require to launch an intent for another app that will grab it and open their search.

   In the very first days I've been using the google engine to get query suggestions right on the Flutter side and display them. So it was in-app, not on the google side. Perhaps you want it like this. It is doable and is also a good practice.

2. It's planned in my mind 🙂 If you don't want to wait for it — I can give you a hint on that. Not so hard as well but is a good practice. Or you can open a separate ticket for it and submit your PR to contribute — it is always welcome.

3. Not a problem at all! Unfortunately it's a routine work. I think I need to refactor that mechanism to allow custom amount of apps displayed...

   Anyways, we have two tickets opened in the very beginning Quick Launch: Allow multiple app lists #2 and Quick Launch: Configure amount of apps #3 — those should solve the problem.

Eh, every time something is planned...

[spencerflagg]

Thanks for the thorough explanation!

1. One option might be to allow the user to add a search engine in the settings, by providing an arbitrary string as the search url - similar to how browsers allow a user to add search engines. So the user would enter something like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s where %s is the place in the string that represents the place where the search query is injected.

   (For ease of use, this could be obfuscated by additionally providing the user with a dropdown menu of common search engines.)

   Then, after text is entered into the search bar in the launcher, the value of the text box would be combined with the provided url and passed to the default browser.

[nivisi]

@spencerflagg unfortunately it's not that easy. As I mentioned, on swipe-down we're not opening our widget and then not searching ourselves, but launching the google app. So that text input belongs to google 😀

Though your idea is correct. Was going to do sth like that in the future.

[nivisi]

@spencerflagg I will keep you updated on that.