dmenu mode

[guemidiborhane]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'm currently replacing walker with vicinae (great work btw) and I have some scripts that require choosing an option, which I piped to walker --dmenu until now

Describe the solution you'd like

I would love it if we had a flag (eg: --dmenu) that would show a list from STDIN

Additional context

A lot of apps/scripts depend on dmenu (or dmenu mode) to prompt the user (eg: iwmenu, bzmenu). So I think having this option is a MUST

[aurelleb]

I will look into it, right now the CLI has many limitations and is only good to trigger deeplinks but reworking it is in the cards.

Also, I know that requires rewriting your existing stuff but did you consider using extensions? It's quite easy to get started with it and they should provide you with everything you need

[guemidiborhane]

I understand that rewriting is an option, but I try to keep my scripts as agnostic as possible. Plus, this feature would open a whole new realm of possibilities to the project, being able to be integrated into other apps/utilities would be great IMHO. I would love to help except that I never did any C++, so that's complicated, I tried to go the Extension route, but couldn't find any way to access STDIN from the current API, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this could also be a possibility: passing STDIN to the extension called using its deeplink

[aurelleb]

Yeah I wasn't talking about using stdin in an extension, that's indeed not really something you can do.

I understand the need for it though, I will think about it.

To make sure I understand, dmenu mode means you want to be able to render a simple list from stdin, one item for every line, and on selection, output the name of the item to stdout ?

[guemidiborhane]

That would be it, and again thank you for all the great work you've done here. I'm here if I can help with the project in any way (I specialise mainly in infrastructure and full stack Web).

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On Sun, 21 Sept 2025, 12:57 pm Aurélien Brabant, ***@***.***> wrote: *aurelien-brabant* left a comment (vicinaehq/vicinae#343) <#343 (comment)> Yeah I wasn't talking about using stdin in an extension, that's indeed not really something you can do. I understand the need for it though, I will think about it. To make sure I understand, dmenu mode means you want to be able to render a simple list from stdin, one item for every line, and on selection, output the name of the item to stdout ? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#343 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA7KVNYGNUOOWOSOXATVMLL3T2HBZAVCNFSM6AAAAACHCEIJLGVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZTGMJVHE2DONJXGI> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[aurelleb]

I appreciate it very much, you can join the discord if you haven't already, as we discuss about some dev stuff on there

[lifeashansen]

This would be really convenient. Currently am using vicinae full time but I still depend on fuzzel for dmenu ish stuff

[karamanliev]

+1 for this, also migrating from walker and have some scripts like screen recording which I want to migrate to vicinae.

Awesome project, keep the good work!

[aurelleb]

dmenu support is next, after I'm done fixing some issues :)

[aurelleb]

Now available in https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae/releases/tag/v0.14.0
Converting this to a discussion in case we need to further discuss the dmenu compatiblity interface.

[guemidiborhane]

Thank you

[idlip]

Hi,

Following on this. I tried the latest dmenu feature and it works well. Thank you!

But I found two prior issues or nice to have feature

1. Fuzzy searching or Orderless way to filter candidates
   eg: If entry has "dmenu mode #417"
   -> "discuss git vicin" should search for this entry

2. Custom input entry
   With only few options, users might like to enter custom text to operate on some scripts (eg: script that asks for file name as in creating new query)
   ATM, vicinae with custom text entered, it outputs with last filtered entry as the result

   echo -e "one\ntwo\nthree" | vicinae dmenu
   type four -> it outputs "one"

[aurelleb]

1. it's not fuzzy searched yet but that would be an improvement
2. is a bug that I need to fix