Close to being twenty years old, Enlightenment is one of Linux’s venerable desktop environments, distinguishing itself from others by being lightweight yet “eye-candy” and also by catering for both the mobile and embedded devices such as smartphones and smart-TVs.
Being less on the mainstream side of Linux, Enlightenment doesn’t see the same development pace that other, more popular, Linux DEs are seeing.
Therefore while advancing in some key areas, such as being one of the first Linux DEs to preliminary support Wayland display manager, other areas of it remained pretty much stagnant over the years.
One such area which has remained stagnant for perhaps too long is the application launcher.
Meet Luncher
“Luncher” is the chosen name of the new application launcher that has already made its way to the lightweight desktop environment’s official repositories.
According to its developer, Stephen Houston of Samsung Open Source Group, Luncher was written in order to replace the more than a decade old ibar which is the current primary application launcher of Enlightenment.
The main idea behind Luncher is for it to be “a simple launcher bar with elegant window previews and more aware code for complete taskbar management”.
Whilst being simple, a “catchy interface and smooth effects” were not spared from its design and are important parts of it.
Being so freshly developed, Luncher is still not available on most Linux distribution repositories as of yet, however, it’s likely going to be soon after a testing period would probably take place.
