I swear it's harder than it sounds...

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00:00 Intro
01:54 Find app list
30:21 Parse desktop file
01:09:35 Launch it

sphaerophoria

A live coding session building an app launcher for a custom Wayland window manager written in Zig. The session covers discovering and parsing XDG desktop files (.desktop format) to enumerate installed applications, implementing iterators to walk XDG_DATA_DIRS, parsing the INI-like desktop entry format, and exploring how to launch applications by parsing the Exec key including handling of backslash escaping, quoting, and field codes. The session also touches on process spawning in Zig and the quirks of the freedesktop.org spec.

How the heck do you launch an app on linux?