merisy-thing / gpcl

GamePad Controlled Launcher written in Rust & Slint

GamePad Controlled Launcher

This is a simple application launcher designed to be an initial screen for my home media center. It respects gamepad inputs and displays a list of connected gamepads, a clock and a row of applications to run.

Lucide icons are used for gamepad status indication.

The launcher converts gamepad inputs into keyboard ones.

Gamepad Button(s)	Keyboard Key(s)	Action
DPad Buttons	Arrow Keys	Move the focus indicator
Bottom Action Button	Enter	Run the selected application
Up Action Button	F5	Reload configuration

Configuration

The config file should be located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gpcl.toml. You can configure window layout and define application list.

Example config:

[layout]
top_panel_height = 80 # default: 32
clock_height = 540 # default: 270
icon_size = 256 # default: 128

[[items]]
name = "Steam"
icon = "/usr/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/steam.png"
exec = "steam -gamepadui"

[[items]]
name = "Kodi"
icon = "/usr/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/kodi.png"
exec = "kodi"

[[items]]
name = "RetroArch"
icon = "/usr/share/pixmaps/retroarch.svg"
exec = "retroarch"

[[items]]
name = "Reboot"
icon = "/home/user/.local/share/pixmaps/reboot.png"
exec = "dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.login1 /org/freedesktop/login1 org.freedesktop.login1.Manager.Reboot boolean:true"

[[items]]
name = "Shutdown"
icon = "/home/user/.local/share/pixmaps/shutdown.png"
exec = "dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.login1 /org/freedesktop/login1 org.freedesktop.login1.Manager.PowerOff boolean:true"

The layout configuration itself and layout parameters are optional. Note that layout parameters are defined in logical pixels.

Build

The launcher is written in Rust, so it is built with cargo. It uses Slint as a graphical toolkit and uses winit as a backend (required to work with windowing API not provided by Slint).

You can build it for Wayland, X11 or for both platforms using wayland (default) and x11 features:

• cargo build --release produces the Wayland-only build,
• cargo build --release --features x11 produces the universal build that support both Wayland and X11
• cargo build --release --no-default-features --features x11 produces the X11-only build