Interior Sergeant-At-Arms, A Simple Singleton Process Manager

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Interior Sergeant-At-Arms

Interior Sergeant-At-Arms(ISAA) is a simple singleton process manager. It’s job is to make sure only one process of a certain class is running at a time. It is broken up into two programs: isaa, a cli tool to attempt to run porcesses with; isaad, a daemon to govern whether to terminate a process or whether attempts to run a process should be allowed or not.

Why?

For me personally, ISAA improved the feel of my GNU/Linux system. For example toggling my app launcher whenever I do the hotkey again, like MacOS. Also, making sure only one widget exists in the same general window position. For the first example, there were shell commands I could use to do this, but those would kill all of my wofi instances and a program is more portable as a whole. For the second example, there are probably ways of working with your compositor to do this, but ISAA attempts to follow the Unix philosophy, allowing it to once again be more portable.

Installation

clone or download a release and cd into it.

Then use make.

Compile.

make

And install.

sudo make install

We have a simple systemd unit you can use for isaad.

cp systemd/isaad.service ~/.config/systemd/user/isaad.service

Then enable and run.

systemctl --user enable --now isaad.service

Check to make sure there are no errors.

systemctl --user status isaad.service

You now have isaa.

Usage

If you need help, you can run isaa --help and a menu will appear with common guidance.

ISAA commands are split into two parts, seperated by the first instance of --.

isaa [OPTIONS ...] -- [COMMAND ...]

There are three options that define what isaa should tell isaad. Based on these isaad may kill processes in the background, and will tell isaa whether it should run the command process or not.

ignore: If a process is running with the class name from ignore, isaad will instruct isaa not to run.

isaa --ignore foo -- process1

toggle: If a process is running with the class name from toggle, isaad will instruct isaa not to run and will kill that running process.

isaa --toggle bar -- process2

replace: If a process is running with the class name from replace, isaad will instruct isaa to run, and will kill that running process.

isaa --replace foobar -- process3

In all these cases, if there are no conflicts, then isaad will instruct isaa to run.

IMPORTANT: If no options were provided, isaad will instruct isaa not to run.

You may chain multiple together in any order.

isaa -i alsoIgnore --ignore side -r alsoReplace --replace top -t alsoToggle --toggle right -- process4

Events are resolved in order.

1. First, ignore: If there is any conflict in ignore, then the process will be ignored, and no replacing or toggling will happen.
2. Then, toggle: If there was no conflict with ignore, but there is conflict with toggle, then it will toggle ALL the conflicts, and no replacing will happen.
3. Finally, replace: If there was no conflict with ignor or toggle, but there is a conflict with replace, then it will replace ALL the conflicts,. This means isaad will terminate them, and isaa will run the command.
4. If no conflicts then isaa will run the command.

Examples

Here are real examples I use in my current setup.

isaa --toggle launcher --replace side -- wofi --show drun

Like MacOS, I have my application launcher set to SUPER+Space. Now, having it set to this allows me to get a nice toggle mechanism, instead of having wofi launch over itself.

isaa --replace side -- nmgui

In my setup I have a variety of applications appear on my right hand side, including my application launcher wofi. This pattern allows my launcher and other side widgets to replace each other.

Contributing

I would love to hear your use case and how I can improve ISAA. You can email me at isaa@robertismo.com.

License

All the code in this repository is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License.