j4-dmenu-desktop

j4-dmenu-desktop is a replacement for i3-dmenu-desktop. It's purpose is to find .desktop files and offer you a menu to start an application using dmenu.

Build requirements

• Compiler with basic C++11 support (GCC 4.6 is probably just fine)
• CMake

Building is the usual cmake/make thingy:

cmake .
make
sudo make install

Invocation

If you specifify arguments to j4-dmenu they will be concatenated and used as the command to start dmenu.

j4-dmenu-desktop

would use dmenu executed with your standard shell ($SHELL if set, /bin/sh otherwise) to start dmenu.

j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu="dmenu -fn 'DejaVu Sans-10' -l 20"

would start dmenu with the -fn and -l arguments to create a vertical menu.

Options

• --dmenu [command] or -d [command], default is "dmenu -i" (-i for case insensitive matching)

FAQ

Case insensitivity?

Add the -i option to the dmenu command

How much faster is it?

% time i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu="cat"
[{"success":true}]
i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu="cat"  0.37s user 0.02s system 96% cpu 0.404 total
% time ./j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=cat
[{"success":true}]
./j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=cat  0.01s user 0.00s system 95% cpu 0.017 total

More than twenty times faster :)