Zazu's v0.5.0 is released!

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Bugs

There were quite a few bugs that were fixed. For example if you ever tried narrowing down your plugin logs in the debugger, it wasn’t working as correctly, but it’s fixed now.

We also made npm more resilient, yet again!

Features

We are introducing a new block type Preview which allows you to display large text on the screen, compared to a small notification. This would be useful for presentations, or for more accessible communications.

We fixed quite a few more bugs and added a few more features, be sure to check out the changelog for information on the rest of the bugs.

Video Introduction to Zazu

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short video about Zazu. Zazu is an open source launcher on steroids. It ships with a rich set of plugins to make your life easy. You can write your own plugins to extend the behavior of Zazu.

Install Zazu

To install Zazu please visit the website and download the appropriate binary for your operating system. Zazu is cross-platform compatible and we currently supply binaries for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu.

Using Zazu

Once it is successfully installed, you can launch Zazu. You’ll notice the feather icon in the menu bar of your operating system. You can now open Zazu using the shortcut key Alt-Space. Launching an application is as simple as typing a few letters from the name of the program. For example typing chr will show Google Chrome in the results.

Default Plugins

Zazu ships with a rich set of plugins that go beyond the simple application launching. One such plugin is a calculator which allows you to do math calculations such as 5 * 3. You can then press enter to automatically copy that result into the clipboard. It can also do a few advanced calculations like converting between feet to inches or pounds to kilograms.

Another useful plugin that ships by default is the clipboard manager which can be launched using Cmd-Shift-V. You can search through this list of items you’ve copied earlier in the day. It can also show you a handy preview of the images you have copied.

Installing Plugins

But the real power of Zazu lies with the plugins contributed by users to satisfy their specific needs. You can browse through a list of available plugins on the [plugins page][plugins page] or you can look at them straight from Zazu by typing list. To install plugins you can type install emoji and click on the emoji plugin you’d like to install.

Updating your Configuration

The configuration for Zazu is stored in a simple JSON file in your home folder. In MacOS and Linux you can find this file under ~/.zazurc.json. On Windows you can find it in C:\Users\YOUR_NAME\.zazurc.json.

In your configuration file, you have options to modify the hotkey to launch Zazu, change the theme, or modify the configuration for individual plugins. Like the fallback searches to show in the results list, or the hotkey for the clipboard manager.

Since this is a text file, you can also back it up, version it and share it with others.

Creating Plugins

If you are interested in creating plugins for Zazu you can find lots of help in the documentation of the website, you can also reach out to the core team or the community members on Gitter. Lastly, if you run into bugs please file an issue on GitHub.

Zazu App