COSMIC Chord

COSMIC Chord, coschord, helps you stay focused while you switch apps under COSMIC¹. Given an app ID, it will make sure that the app is running and has a window selected. Once coschord is on a few keyboard shortcuts, when your monkey brain thinks "show me web page," your fingers can make the right thing happen instantly. No fiddling with the mouse, and no distractions.

I set up COSMIC's custom keyboard shortcuts (cosmic-settings keyboard) like this:

app	chord	command
COSMIC Files	Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F	coschord com.system76.CosmicFiles
COSMIC Terminal	Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T	coschord com.system76.CosmicTerm
GNU Emacs	Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E	coschord emacs
Google Chrome	Ctrl-Alt-Shift-W	coschord google-chrome

Usage: coschord [<app_id>] [<launch_command>...]

If there are matching windows, coschord will select the first one it finds. If one is already selected, coschord will select the next one.

If there are no matching windows, coschord will start the app using launch_command, e.g.:

coschord emacs /usr/local/bin/emacs

If you only supply app_id (e.g. coschord emacs), coschord will run the launch command for app_id found in ~/.config/coschord/commands.json.

To see the app IDs of all running programs, run coschord with no arguments.

Here's a sample commands.json configuration file:

{
  "com.system76.CosmicFiles": ["cosmic-files"],
  "com.system76.CosmicTerm": ["cosmic-term"],
  "emacs": ["emacs"],
  "google-chrome": ["google-chrome"]
}

coschord is written in Rust. To build and install it:

cd coschord
cargo build --release
cargo install --path .

Footnotes

1. I switched to COSMIC after upgrading my System76 laptop to Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS. COSMIC's tiling window manager is so good that I don't need the window-manipulation parts of my Window Chord project any more. coschord was the only missing piece. ↩