jleary / hey

Hey: A Launcher/Proof of Concept

One of the things that I miss the most from MacOS is AppleScript. Yes, Linux has Bash and a myriad of other scripting languages but AppleScript integrates really well with GUI applications; most applications expose functionality to scripts via libraries (called "Dictionaries" in AppleScript parlance) and these functions can be called upon relatively easily via external scripts.

While looking for something to satiate my scripting urge, I found out that DBus has much of the same functionality as AppleScript and AppleEvents. I also found out that BeOS/HaikuOS has a program called hey which allows for much of the same level of interprocess scripting as AppleScript (albeit used as a command and not as a whole language).

What resulted is my very limited implementation of hey using DBus calls (and .desktop files).

Dependencies

• A modern version of perl
• File::DesktopEntry
• Net::Dbus
• Net::Dbus::Binding::Value

Limitations

Right now, since hey is using a library to open FreeDesktop .desktop files for intial launch (and since that library is somewhat buggy), .desktop files with reverse domain names (e.g. org.gnome.Epiphany) are not able to open up. If I continue developing hey past the proof of concept stage, I will probably either find a better library or implement my own launch functionality.

Also, the number of applications supported for DBus use and the number of functions supported is fairly limited as well.

Finally, the way I am determining which library to load and the manner in which I am actually loading them is quite crude; for the purposes of a proof of concept this is all right but if I were to develop hey further, I would implement that part in a better manner.