FAQ

Answers to commonly asked questions.

Vicinae is not packaged for my distribution. How should I install it?

Use the script to install the AppImage version, which should work fine on most systems. Don't forget to follow the quickstart guide for your environment once you are done installing.

How to set a keyboard shortcut to open vicinae?

Vicinae doesn't support global shortcuts at the moment. You should use whatever is the preferred way to set global shortcuts for your environment. If there is a quickstart guide for your environment, this is probably explained there.

How to set a keyboard shortcut to open a specific command?

You can use deeplinks like so:

vicinae vicinae://extensions/vicinae/clipboard/history

How to focus the app window instead of opening a new one?

You can change the default action that is executed for a given application from the settings window. Search for the Applications group and the option should be there.

How to use custom app launcher?

App launchers such as uwsm should be detected automatically. If that is not the case, you can specify a custom app launcher in the settings.

Vicinae doesn't pass X environment variable to my apps

Apps launched by vicinae inherit from the parent's environment without any modification. This probably means the environment variable that is missing is not properly injected in vicinae's environment when started.

The vicinae window takes a long time to appear

Make sure you are not running the unextracted AppImage directly every time you want to call vicinae toggle. You should probably use the script to automatically extract the AppImage components.

How can I extend vicinae?

Three main ways, from least to most customizable:

• dmenu mode
• script commands
• Typescript SDK

How to deal with read-only configuration?

Vicinae expects the main settings.json file to be readable AND writable since it will write configuration changes to it when things are edited from the GUI.

For now, the only solution is to use the imports key in this file to import your read-only config from there.

Vicinae uses a lot of RAM

Looking at how much memory Vicinae is using in a process monitor such as btop is a very bad way to measure how much memory it is really using. This is particularly true for graphical applications that reuse memory a lot (for instance, to show high quality images). Memory returned to the OS has to be reclaimed and it is an expensive operation. This is why it is not done unless the operating system really needs it.

You should be concerned about vicinae's memory usage only if your system has very little RAM left and vicinae is still using a lot of memory. In practice, this is almost never the case. Vicinae will automatically release memory if the system becomes stressed.

Vicinae needs ~100MB to operate on a regular load, not much more than that.