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 dmenu from the official repositories.

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. Also, it is helpful to Prelink dmenu.

Displaying Custom Items

Custom items may be shown by piping them into dmenu. For example:

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

Fonts

dmenu can be patched to allow using xft fonts which don't seem to be working with the version from upstream. The patched version can be found in the dmenu-xft package from the AUR. Using this version, fonts like Droid Sans Mono can be set.

$ dmenu_run -fn 'Droid Sans Mono-9'

Troubleshooting

Strange segfaulting

If executing dmenu_run results in an error similar to this:

 $ dmenu_run
 /usr/bin/dmenu_run: line 15: 1879 Segmentation fault           dmenu "$@" < "$cache"

And running dmenu crashes like the following:

 $ echo "blahblahblah" 

Make sure $LANG is set to something valid. For example, this problem may occur if one needs to set $LANG to en_US.UTF_8 or something similar in /etc/locale.conf (see locale.conf).

Keep in mind that the value contained in $LANG must be uncommented in /etc/locale.gen and generated via locale-gen as well.

Scripts in $PATH not loaded

This happens because dmenu doesn't inherit environment set in ~/.bashrc. To fix this, put the export line in .xinitrc:

~/.xinitrc

export PATH=$PATH:~/bin/:~/scripts/

Delete ~/.cache/dmenu_cache and restart X.

See Also

• dmenu – The official dmenu website
• Yeganesh – a light wrapper that reorders commands based on popularity. Written in Haskell
• xboomx – yet another light wrapper that reorders commands based on popularity. Written in Python. Minimal dependencies
• dmenu-launch (AUR) – A simple Dmenu-based application launcher. Launches binaries and XDG shortcuts.
• Dmenu Hacking thread – Dmenu hacking thread in arch linux forums.