Saul-Dickson / dmenu

dmenu-distrotube

Table of Contents

• What is dmenu?
• What is dmenu-distrotube
• Mouse functionality
• Available flags
• Installing dmenu-distrotube on Arch Linux
• Installing dmenu-distrotube on other Linux distributions

What is dmenu?

dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, originally designed for dwm. It manages large numbers of user-defined menu items efficiently. It is a very powerful tool that allows you to pipe information into it. This makes dmenu a perfect utility to incorporate into your scripting.

What is dmenu-distrotube

dmenu-distroube is my personal build of dmenu that is very heavily patched to add more functionality and more customization options. The patches that I used in this build include:

• dmenu-border – adds border around dmenu window
• dmenu-center – centers dmenu in the middle of screen (-c)
• dmenu-fuzzyhighlight – fuzzy matches gets highlighted
• dmenu-fuzzymatch – adds support for fuzzy-matching
• dmenu-grid – adds a flag (-g) to specify the number of grid columns
• dmenu-lineheight – adds a flag (-h) to set the minimum height of dmenu lines
• dmenu-morecolor – creates a color option for use the entries adjacent to the selection
• dmenu-mousesupport – basic mouse support
• dmenu-numbers – Displays number of matched and total items in top right corner

Mouse functionality

Mouse actions supported:

• Left-mouse click:
  • On prompt and input field: clear input text and selection.
  • In horizontal and vertical mode on item: select and output item (same as pressing enter).
  • In horizontal mode on arrows: change items to show left or right.
• Ctrl-left-mouse click: multisel modifier.
• Right-mouse click: close.
• Middle-mouse click:
  • Paste current selection.
  • While holding shift: paste primary selection.
• Scroll up:
  • In horizontal mode: same as left-clicking on left arrow.
  • In vertical mode: show items above.
• Scroll down:
  • In horizontal mode: same as left-clicking on right arrow.
  • In vertical mode: show items below.

Available flags

• [-l lines]
• [-g columns]
• [-p prompt]
• [-fn font]
• [-m monitor]
• [-h height]
• [-nb color]
• [-nf color]
• [-sb color]
• [-sf color]
• [-nhb color]
• [-nhf color]
• [-shb color]
• [-shf color]
• [-w windowid]
• [-c] for centering

An example: dmenu_run -c -bw 2 -l 20 -g 4 -p ‘Run: ’

This launches dmenu_run with -c (centered), -bw (border width), -l (number of vertical lines) and -g (number of grid columns).

Installing dmenu-distrotube on Arch Linux

All you need to do is to download the PKGBUILD from this repository. Then run the following command:

makepkg -cf

This will create a file that ends in .pkg.tar.zst (for example, dmenu-distrotube-git-5.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst). Then run:

sudo pacman -U *.pkg.tar.zst

Alternatively, you could also install dmenu-distrotube-git from my own personal Arch repository. To do so, add the following to the end of /etc/pacman.conf :

[dt-arch-repo]
SigLevel = Optional DatabaseOptional
Server = https://gitlab.com/dwt1/$repo/-/raw/master/$arch

Then, sync the repositories and update your system with: sudo pacman -Syyu

And, then: sudo pacman -S dmenu-distrotube-git

NOTE: Installing dmenu-distrotube-git conflicts with the standard dmenu package. If you already have dmenu installed, you will be asked if you want to remove dmenu and install dmenu-distrotube-git instead.

Installing dmenu-distrotube on other Linux distributions

Download the source code from this repository or use a git clone:

• git clone https://gitlab.com/dwt1/dmenu-distrotube.git
• cd dmenu-distrotube
• sudo make clean install

NOTE: Installing dmenu-distrotube will overwrite your existing dmenu installation so make a backup of your current config if you need it.