term-dmenu

A replacement for Rofi, dmenu, and other launchers that uses FZF and a plain-old terminal emulator.

I recommend altering these scripts to suit your preferences.

What's inside

The main script is term-dmenu and its dependency floating-terminal. term-dmenu is a dmenu replacement that turns stdin into an interactive menu and sends output back to stdout. In other words, if you don't use any of dmenu's CLI options, you can probably just alias dmenu=term-dmenu and you'll be just fine.

Helper scripts work with term-dmenu. If you set the environment variable $DMENU_PROGRAM to something else (e.g. dmenu or rofi -dmenu), the helper scripts will use those programs instead.

• dmenu-runner can run any executable in your $PATH. Because of the large number of executables on most systems, recent entries are saved and prioritized to make searching easier.
• app-launcher launches desktop applications using j4-dmenu-desktop
• window-switcher allows listing/filtering/selecting open windows in Sway or i3 (much like what Alt+TAB does on most desktop environments).

Dependencies

• FZF
• j4-dmenu-desktop for app-launcher
• window-switcher requires Sway or i3 to be running

Configuration

If you don't want to use term-dmenu but would like to use some of the helper scripts

Differences from similar implementations

Other projects attempting to replace dmenu/rofi with terminal emulators exist, most notably sway-launcher-desktop. I created my own project instead of contributing upstream because I had different goals:

• Modularity: split dmenu functionality into term-dmenu, and make helper scripts work with dmenu, rofi, and term-dmenu equally well.
• 100% POSIX shell compatibility; no bashisms. Running these scripts with dash (the Debian Almquist shell) should yield faster startup speed.
• app-launcher uses j4-dmenu-desktop to find .desktop files, which is better than using shell/AWK expressions.
• floating-terminal launches the terminal. If the environment variable $FLOATING_TERMINAL is unset, it runs the first of the following programs that is found in $PATH:
  1. havoc $@
  2. alacritty --class=launcher -e $@
  3. kitty --class=launcher -e $@
  4. konsole -e $@
  5. gnome-terminal -e $@
  6. termite -e $@
  7. st -c launcher -e $@
  8. xterm -e $@

Acknowledgements

dmenu-runner code is based on this script by FlyingWombat (Wayback Machine, archive.today), with inspiration from dmenu_run_history.

Many bits of code were borrowed from the discussion in issue 1367 of Sway's GitHub issue tracker.