The dmesktop program is in many ways like dmenu_run, but it draws the list of programs to select from using the XDG Desktop Entry specification instead of just using applications on the $PATH (which includes non-graphical programs you might not need to start via such a menu, like ls or sed).

Because of slight annoyances with the startup time of Python 3, and also because of wanting some richer reuable components, dmesktop is being rewritten in Rust.

The previous dmesktop script requires Python 3.6 or greater, and hasn't been tested on any machine but my own.

Known Alternatives

• i3-dmenu-desktop is the same basic program, but it assumes that you're using i3 to start the programs in question.
• rofi is a much more full-featured dmenu-like application switcher/launcher which includes this as a mode, in addition to many other modes