gmenu

A centered, dmenu-like launcher for X11 written in Rust. Reads newline-separated items on stdin, lets you filter them with a substring search, and prints the selection to stdout.

• Centered floating popup (override-redirect) on the monitor under the pointer.
• Substring matching, case-insensitive by default; matched spans are highlighted.
• Designed to stay snappy on extremely large lists (parallel filtering with incremental refinement; only visible rows are drawn).
• Pango/Cairo rendering — any font that fontconfig can find works.
• Styling via a config file at ~/.config/gmenu/config.toml.

Build

Requires a Rust toolchain and the system libraries libx11/libxcb, cairo, pango, and pangocairo. On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libxcb1-dev libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev
cargo build --release

Install

make install                # copies to ~/.local/bin/gmenu
make install PREFIX=/usr/local   # or anywhere else

Use

ls /usr/bin | gmenu                         # pick a binary
gmenu --prompt "run> " < ~/recipes.txt      # prompt + custom input
seq 1 5000000 | gmenu                       # 5M items, still responsive

Selected line is written to stdout. Pressing Enter with no match prints the query verbatim. Escape exits with status 1.

CLI flags

Per-invocation only — styling lives in the config file.

Flag	Default	Description
-p, --prompt TEXT	""	Text shown before the input field
-s, --case-sensitive	off	Case-sensitive substring matching
--max-matches N	100000	Cap on matches retained for filtering

Keys

Key	Action
Enter	Print selection and exit 0 (or query if no match)
Escape	Exit 1
↑ / ↓, Ctrl+K / Ctrl+J	Move selection
Tab	Move selection down
PgUp / PgDn	Page
Home / End	Jump to first / last match
Backspace	Delete char (Ctrl+Backspace or Ctrl+W = word)
Ctrl+L	Clear query

Configuration

Copy examples/config.toml to ~/.config/gmenu/config.toml and edit. All keys are optional.

font = "PragmataPro 12"

bg      = "#222222"
fg      = "#dddddd"
selbg   = "#005577"
selfg   = "#ffffff"
matchbg = "#3b3b00"
matchfg = "#ffff66"

border       = "#888888"
border_width = 2

width  = 700
height = 420

padding_x     = 10  # left/right inset for content
padding_y     = 6   # top/bottom inset for content
row_padding_y = 6   # extra vertical space per item row

The font value is a Pango font description (<Family> [Style] <Size>). Find installed family names with fc-list | grep -i <name>.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.