Farnsworth Launcher

A simple Electron based, configurable launcher for systems connected to a TV. Farnsworth is optimized for use with a keyboard, remote, or controller (see Remote & Controller section below as that requires some further setup).There is no "media" functionality, that is, no video or music library or support for live TV. Farnsworth's purpose is to simply launch other applications and get out of the way. Farnsworth is heavily inspired by the Android TV Launcher though is simplified in many ways.

The launcher allows the setup of individual "Categories" containing "Tiles". At this time, creating new tiles requires the use of a mouse or touchscreen due to it being a bit complicated to add keyboard support for md-color-picker.

The grid of categories/tiles can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. Help for keybindings is available at any time (when not in the edit tile or settings sections) by pushing ?.

Internal Commands

When creating tiles, there are several "internal" commands that can be used to trigger actions within Farnsworth itself rather than launching an external program. Generally, any function within HomeController in home.js can be called with the custom url about:farnsworth/${function}. The following are some useful commands:

• about:farnsworth/addTile: Invoke the add a new tile page.
• about:farnsworth/exit: Exit the app.
• about:farnsworth/appSettings: Open application settings.
• about:farnsworth/minimize: Minimize the app.

Remote & Controller

Due to limitations in the mousetrap library as well as Chromium, there is no support for game controllers at this time. Ideally, the Gamepad API will be more supported in browsers and thus Chromium in the future. At the moment, AutoHotkey can be used to support arbitrary key mappings.

Additionally, Valve's Steam Controller also works quite well. Most remotes that emulate a keyboard seem to work well too. Farnsworth was primarily tested with this one.

The following simple AutoHotkey script is useful for closing and switching apps:

Escape::
Browser_Home::
    WinGet, ActiveWindow, ProcessName, A

    if (ActiveWindow != "Farnsworth Launcher.exe")
    {
        Send !{F4}
    }

    return

AppsKey::Send #{Tab}

Development

# Clone this repository
git clone [email protected]:ikogan/farnsworth.git
# Go into the repository
cd farnsworth
# Install dependencies and run the app
npm install && npm start

Debugging may be accomplished with npm run debug and attaching with an appropriate debugger to the standard port. The following command line options are supported:

• --develop: Open developer tools once the renderer starts up.
• --windowed: Do not fullscreen automatically.

These may be specified to start and debug in the following manner:

npm run debug -- --develop --windowed

Packaging

electron-builder is used to build packages and may be invoked with npm run dist. This will build 32-bit and 64-bit packages for Windows, OS X (64-bit only), and Linux (rpm, deb, and tar.gz).

Note that, at this time, the Windows package has undergone the most testing and most of the Linux packages have undergone none.

TODO

At the moment, this is completele enough to use for my own purposes but there is much left that should be done:

• Keyboard support for edit tiles and settings screens
• Refactor controls to be more generic, grid based?
• Native support for game controllers
• "Profiles" for a given tile: launch the tile command differently depending on a profile selected at launch time.
• Customizable background color, image, list URL
• Cleanup as indicated in the source
• Scrolling the view up and down so more than 3 categories is workable... don't kill me.

License Apache-2.0