4 ms·

I think dmenu is a good example of this. It's a common launcher application that's (at least) known to all i3 users. Here's a succinct explanation from the man

I think dmenu is a good example of this. It's a common launcher application that's (at least) known to all i3 users. Here's a succinct explanation from the man page: "dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, which reads a list of newline-separated items from stdin. When the user selects an item and presses Return, their choice is printed to stdout and dmenu terminates. Entering text will narrow the items to those matching the tokens in the input. dmenu_run is a script used by dwm(1) which lists programs in the user's $PATH and runs the result in their $SHELL." In practice you press Super + D, type a few letters to match the name of your program (such as "fox" for "firefox"), and press enter. It's so fast that any delay is near imperceptible even on older hardware. It also accepts command line arguments if you don't care to read the stdout from the process. This is a stupidly simple program that works with no configuration unless you want to change the font size.

mort96 9y ago
dmenu is so refreshingly simple. There's no attempt at being clever, no attempt at using “AI” to figure out what you mean; it just does a stupid deterministic search and lists the results alphabetically. There’s exactly zero chance for it to suddenly incorrectly second guess your command. My only gripe about it was that it would’ve been useful to be able to write math expressions in it like you can in Spotlight... so I made a wrapper script which adds that :) https://github.com/mortie/mmenu https://github.com/mortie/mmenu
JetSpiegel 9y ago
If you want the same experience with more eye-candy, look into rofi. https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi It has default submodules to replace dmenu_run, a similar mode that lists the XDG applications (akin to the Start Menu you get on Mint, Fedora or other full-fat DE), SSH that parses `~/.ssh/config`, a dmenu-compatible mode for scripts and a Python API to implement custom modes.

mort96 9y ago

dmenu is so refreshingly simple. There's no attempt at being clever, no attempt at using “AI” to figure out what you mean; it just does a stupid deterministic search and lists the results alphabetically. There’s exactly zero chance for it to suddenly incorrectly second guess your command. My only gripe about it was that it would’ve been useful to be able to write math expressions in it like you can in Spotlight... so I made a wrapper script which adds that :) https://github.com/mortie/mmenu https://github.com/mortie/mmenu

JetSpiegel 9y ago

If you want the same experience with more eye-candy, look into rofi. https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi It has default submodules to replace dmenu_run, a similar mode that lists the XDG applications (akin to the Start Menu you get on Mint, Fedora or other full-fat DE), SSH that parses `~/.ssh/config`, a dmenu-compatible mode for scripts and a Python API to implement custom modes.