Rofi

Rofi is a modern dmenu successor. Usually, it looks like an on-screen menu and helps to

  • switch windows quickly
  • launch programs
  • select stuff
Rofi in a window switching mode

Usage

$ rofi -modi "window,run,ssh" -show run
  • -modi enables some builtin “tabs”, “window” stays for window switcher, “run” gives you a app launcher (any executable from $PATH), “ssh” selects the host to connect to
  • -show sets an active tab

In “run” mode you can run the selected item in a new shell window buy pressing <Shift>-<Return> instead sole <Return>.

There are many options for the look&feel and behavior customization. So just read man rofi :)

Custom menus

One can just pipe to Rofi some text strings and then select any of them using fuzzy matching. Rofi keeps selection history and makes future choices even quicker.

That’s how I use Rofi to switch between video outputs:

# files in ~/.screenlayout/ are profiles saved from arandr(1)
ls -1 .screenlayout/*.sh | rofi -dmenu -p 'Screen Layout:' | xargs -r sh

And here is my “remote control” for the /mpd (using mpc):

echo 'toggle\nnext\nprev\nplay\nstop' | rofi -dmenu -p 'MPD:' | xargs mpc

User scripts

Because Rofi is scriptable and you can define custom modes for it there are many “user scripts” made by community:

  • password and bookmark managers
  • removable device switchers
  • desktop calculators
  • etc

Menu-bases GUI

I (/who/astynax) have built a simple Python library named pyrofi to build user interfaces from nested menus.

There are libraries that are way more powerful than mine. The python-rofi-menu for example. But I found it too complicated for my pretty simple cases: I just don’t want to define a couple of classes to have a simple menu. So my pyrofi uses a single function call and a single data structure and all the program looks like that:

run_menu({
    'Calculator': ['xcalc'],
    'Games': {
        'Rogue': ['rogue'],
        'Angband': ['angband']
    },
    'Calendar': ['ncal', '2020'],
})

Wofi

Wofi is a clone of Rofi for the [Wayland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol).