I replaced niri's built-in show hotkeys overlay with a custom Walker menu that is searchable, multi-column and runs the command you pick

[nickjj]

Why

niri's hotkey overlay menu has a few concerns:

• If you have a lot of hotkeys with titles, the window can become taller than your display cutting things off
• It's not searchable
• When viewing hotkeys, oftentimes you want to perform an action after finding the key, it doesn't let you do this

I don't know Rust enough to contribute a PR to address these and niri deserves better than AI slop. There's also an open issue discussing how to solve the first problem but a decision wasn't made on how to do it, so progress has stalled.

In my case I have the following use case with 50 hotkeys:

• Wanted the menu to fit well on both my desktop with a 4k monitor at native scaling and my laptop with a 1080p display
• Wanted a quick way to search and filter binds by key or title
• Wanted to make it easier for anyone using my dotfiles to access and explore keybinds

The custom menu

Here's what it looks like:

This gets generated by parsing binds from your niri config(s). If you pick one, it runs whatever was assigned. You don't have to add anything extra or special to your niri configs.

Here's the commit that added it and you can always find the most up to date version of it here.

I chose Walker because I already use it and it supports custom menus. It could pretty easily be ported to other finders.

Custom Walker menus are written in Lua script. I'm mostly a Python, Ruby and shell script developer. I've written a few small Neovim plugins (Lua) and enhancements but I don't really know Lua script.

I wanted to keep it as a zero dependency script so I didn't pull in any third party libraries. That means I had to write a partial KDL parser. I didn't go too crazy here but it does support recursively finding your niri configs in the order you include them, overwriting duplicate binds where the last one wins, ignores all commented lines, supports single or multi-line binds and spawn commands.

I only spent around 2 hours on it so there might be edge cases or bugs I didn't account for. If you find one please open an issue in my dotfiles or reply here. I'll do my best to fix it, or if you know how please open a PR. So far I only tested it against my niri configs where it does parse it all successfully.

Next steps

This is mainly a proof of concept. I hope in the future niri itself has something similar or better built-in so it works out of the box for everyone. Little tools like this can be used to experiment without integrating with niri itself.

[YaLTeR]

Well, it is called "Important Hotkeys" and not "All Hotkeys"... And making your own menu is perfectly fine, I believe some other project already did something similar :)

[abenz1267]

Would you mind if i steal it and put it into the elephant-community repo?

[nickjj]

Sure, I went ahead and put up a PR at abenz1267/elephant-community#9.