plasma-hud

Provides a way to run menubar commands through rofi, much like the Unity 7 Heads-Up Display (HUD). plasma-hud was forked from mate-hud which was based on i3-hud-menu. There's also a gnome-hud.

If you are interested in Unity's other feature, locally integrated menus in window titlebars, then you may want to check out the Material KWin decoration which has that feature.

What is a HUD and why should I care?

A Heads-Up Display (HUD) allows you to search through an application's appmenu. So if you're trying to find that single filter in Gimp but can't remember which filter category it fits into or if you can't recall if preferences sits under File, Edit or Tools on your favourite browser, you can just search for it rather than hunting through the menus.

Install via Package Manager

• AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/plasma-hud-git/

Install via GitHub

Dependencies

apt (Kubuntu / KDE Neon)

sudo apt install rofi python3 python3-dbus python3-setproctitle python3-xlib gir1.2-gtk-3.0
sudo apt install appmenu-gtk2-module appmenu-gtk3-module # Gtk2 / Gtk3

Or use unity-gtk2-module unity-gtk3-module for Gtk2 / Gtk3.

pacman (Arch)

pacman -S rofi python python-dbus python-setproctitle python-xlib python-gobject gobject-introspection
pacman -S appmenu-gtk-module

Manual Install

• Either use the Global Menu widget, or add the App Menu button in to the titlebar.
• Download plasma-hud

git clone https://github.com/Zren/plasma-hud
cd plasma-hud

• Install files

sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/plasma-hud
sudo cp usr/lib/plasma-hud/plasma-hud /usr/lib/plasma-hud/
sudo mkdir -p /etc/xdg/autostart
sudo cp etc/xdg/autostart/plasma-hud.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/

• Either run the script in the terminal for plasma-hud to work in your current session. Or relog since it should now autostart the next time you login.

/usr/lib/plasma-hud/plasma-hud

• Run the following commands to bind the Alt keys. For Arch users, you will need qt5-tools installed to run qdbus.

kwriteconfig5 --file ~/.config/kwinrc --group ModifierOnlyShortcuts --key Alt "com.github.zren.PlasmaHUD,/PlasmaHUD,com.github.zren.PlasmaHUD,toggleHUD"
qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure

• If you wish to bind to a normal shortcut key like Menu or Alt+F1 then create a new custom global shortcut in the System Settings.
  • System Settings > Shortcuts > Custom Shortcut
  • Edit > New > Global Shortcut > D-Bus Command
  • Trigger > Shortcut: Menu
  • Action > Remote application: com.github.zren.PlasmaHUD
  • Action > Remote object: /PlasmaHUD
  • Action > Function: toggleHUD
  • Action > Arguments: Leave it empty

Manual Uninstall

• Run the following commands to unbind the Alt keys.

kwriteconfig5 --file ~/.config/kwinrc --group ModifierOnlyShortcuts --key Alt ""
qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure

• Uninstall files

sudo rm /usr/lib/plasma-hud/plasma-hud
sudo rm /etc/xdg/autostart/plasma-hud.desktop

Settings

If you manually create ~/.config/plasmahudrc you can change any of the following settings.

[General]
Matching=fuzzy
Sort=true
Lines=20
Location=center
Width=80

[Icons]
Enabled=true
Theme=breeze-dark

[Shortcuts]
Enabled=true

[Style]
Font=Sans 10
Title=::

[Colors]
Background=#111111
Foreground=#eeeff0
SelectedBackground=#062d25
SelectedForeground=#1abc9c
Borders=#000000
ShortcutForeground=#888888

• [General] Matching=fuzzy can be either fuzzy matching or normal matching where it matches a keyword exactly. See man rofi | grep "\-matching" -A20 for more info.

• [General] Location=center specifies the position relative to the window for the HUD to appear and can be one of the following values:
  northwest, north, northeast, west, center, east, southwest, south, southeast

• [General] Width=80 is 80% of the window width. The default is 100% window width.

• [Style] Title=:: will change the HUD: prompt text to ::: which is roughly the width of an icon.

You can also set [Style] RofiTheme=Arc to select a rofi theme in:

• /usr/share/rofi/themes/
• ~/.local/share/rofi/themes/

[Style]
RofiTheme=Arc-Dark

Testing

Run the following commands in a terminal like Konsole to debug plasma-hud.

killall plasma-hud ; LOGLEVEL=DEBUG ~/Code/plasma-hud/usr/lib/plasma-hud/plasma-hud