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lharding

Member

From: Portland, OR

Registered: 2013-01-17

Posts: 22

Website

dmenu-xdg - dmenu based desktop menu launcher

Because there is absolutely no ideological disagreement whatsoever between the XDG and suckless.org people, I've written this script that scans a collection of directories you specify for XDG .desktop files, parses them, and then builds a cache file you can select from using dmenu to launch programs as if it were xfce-menu or what have you.

The github: https://github.com/lharding/dmenu-xdg

It's pretty rough at the moment (hardcoded file locations, no error handling at all), this is mostly a trial to see if anyone but me is interested in something like this before I go polishing it overmuch.

To use, run install.sh or copy the files into ~/bin, and copy the .conf file into ~/.config and modify it as you please (it's just a python file that gets exec'd, so you can put any site-specific hackery you want in there). Then hook build-menu.py into a cronjob (or if your machine has a decent SSD just alias it to run before you run dmenu-xdg - for me it takes under 200ms to scan all of /usr/share), and then invoke dmenu-xdg by your quicklaunch method of choice.

Thoughts?

bslackr

Member

Registered: 2012-01-27

Posts: 131

Re: dmenu-xdg - dmenu based desktop menu launcher

In case you didn't know, there is a perl script that just just what you are describing that comes with i3. You can check it out here if you want.

lharding

Member

From: Portland, OR

Registered: 2013-01-17

Posts: 22

Website

Re: dmenu-xdg - dmenu based desktop menu launcher

Huh, so it does, and it includes all the features I had on my roadmap! Thanks for the pointer.

I'll leave this up here as a solution for really seriously RAM-constrained (the actual runtime invokation is just sh, not even bash) machines (Openpandora, Rasberry Pi, etc), which is what originally inspired me to write it.

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,279

Re: dmenu-xdg - dmenu based desktop menu launcher

There is also a c version of the i3 script as part of the j4tools collection. This helps with speed and memory

Last edited by progandy (2013-08-15 20:56:30)

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