dmenu

dmenu is a fast and lightweight dynamic menu for X. It reads arbitrary text from stdin, and creates a menu with one item for each line. The user can then select an item, through the arrow keys or typing a part of the name, and the line is printed to stdout. dmenu_run is a wrapper that ships with the dmenu distribution that allows its use as an application launcher.

Installation

Install the dmenu package.

Various patched variants exist which extend dmenu's default functionality.

You may run dmenu with:

$ dmenu_run

Configuration

Now, you will want to attach the dmenu_run command to a keystroke combination. This can be done either via your window manager or desktop environment configuration, or with a program like xbindkeys. See the Hotkeys article for more information.

Displaying custom items

Custom items will be shown by separating them with a new line (\n) and piping them into dmenu. For example:

$ echo -e "first\nsecond\nthird" | dmenu

Manually adding items

dmenu will look for executables in the directories defined in your $PATH. For information on modifying your $PATH see environment variables.

Fonts

dmenu can display fonts using XFT. This example will run dmenu using ttf-droid:

$ dmenu_run -fn 'Droid Sans Mono-9'

Support for shell aliases

dmenu does not support shell aliases. To have dmenu recognize your aliases, install the dmenu-recent-aliases-git^AUR package and run dmenu-recent-aliases. Your aliases must be in ~/.bash_aliases to be recognized by dmenu-recent-aliases.

Support for history

To sort commands by recency, download dmenu_run_history to your $PATH and use dmenu_run_history instead of dmenu_run.

Tips and tricks

Taking input using dmenu

Inside a script (e.g. launched from a shortcut), getting user input is sometimes required. We can use dmenu for this, by passing it an EOF: the selection field will be empty and dmenu can take user input.

Since reading /dev/null will return an EOF, this can simply be done by the following command:

$ dmenu < /dev/null

Embedding in current terminal

Dmenu can be embeded inside any window using the -w id option.

To embed it inside the currenctly active window (like for example the terminal it is being run from), use xdo to get its id:

$ echo hello | dmenu -w $(xdo id)

Troubleshooting

No locale support

Running dmenu_run results in the following error message:

$ dmenu_run

no locale support

Make sure that the environment variable LANG is correctly set. See the following for more information: Locale#Troubleshooting

Missing menu entries

If certain entries are missing from dmenu, the cache may be malformed. Delete it and restart dmenu.

$ rm ~/.dmenu_cache
$ rm ~/.cache/dmenu_run

Note that there will most likely be only one cache file, depending on if $XDG_CACHE_HOME is set. See the contents of /usr/bin/dmenu_run for more information.

Environment variables

Environment variables needed for applications should instead be added to /etc/environment.