dmenu is an efficient dynamic menu for X.
dmenu-rs is a 1:1 port of dmenu rewritten in Rust. It looks, feels, and
runs pixel-for-pixel exactly the same.
It also has plugin support for easy modification.
The master branch is a stable, feature complete product. It it not unmaintained; it's finished.
There is a small and ever-shrinking chance that this will be updated or overhauled in the distant future. It is much more likely that I will write a spiritual successor from scratch, but that won't happen until at least 2023.
This project started with dmenu-calc.
Initially, I wanted much more function than what is provided by bc. However, I
found the bottleneck to be a lack of functionality and modability in dmenu(1)
itself. So, the choice I had was to either mod dmenu(1) or rewrite it. Because
dmenu source is horrendously annoying to read, I decided to rewrite it in a
language which lends itself to writing code that is easier to modify. There are
other languages for this, but I like Rust.
As mentioned earlier, dmenu-rs runs exactly the same as dmenu. However, there
are some significant performance enhancements under the hood. The most impactful
is memory usage: dmenu-rs uses 21.65% less memory[1], while managing it much
more safely without any performance impacts. The other large improvement is
plugin support; read below.
dmenu-rs leverages rust crates overrider and proc_use to provide an easy to
write and powerful plugin system. The end-result are plugins which are dead-simple
to enable.
For a list of available plugins and more info on
enabling plugins, run make plugins.
For more info on developing plugins, read the plugin guide.
Edit config.mk to match your local setup (dmenu is installed into the /usr/local namespace by default).
Afterwards enter the following command to build dmenu:
make
Then, to install (if necessary as root):
make install
dmenu-rs is available from the following sources:
If you'd like for this to be available on another distro, raise an issue or submit a pull request with a README change pointing to the released package.
See the man page for details. For a quick test, run:
make test
[1]: According to valgrind(1)