dmenu-rs - dynamic menu

dmenu is an efficient dynamic menu for X.
dmenu-rs is a 1:1 port of dmenu rewritten in Rust. It looks, feels, and runs pixel-for-pixel exactly the same.
It also has plugin support for easy modification.

State of the project

The master branch is a stable, feature complete product. It it not unmaintained; it's finished.

There is a small and ever-shrinking chance that this will be updated or overhauled in the distant future. It is much more likely that I will write a spiritual successor from scratch, but that won't happen until at least 2023.

Why Rust?

Inspiration

This project started with dmenu-calc. Initially, I wanted much more function than what is provided by bc. However, I found the bottleneck to be a lack of functionality and modability in dmenu(1) itself. So, the choice I had was to either mod dmenu(1) or rewrite it. Because dmenu source is horrendously annoying to read, I decided to rewrite it in a language which lends itself to writing code that is easier to modify. There are other languages for this, but I like Rust.

Improvements

As mentioned earlier, dmenu-rs runs exactly the same as dmenu. However, there are some significant performance enhancements under the hood. The most impactful is memory usage: dmenu-rs uses 21.65% less memory^[1], while managing it much more safely without any performance impacts. The other large improvement is plugin support; read below.

Plugins

dmenu-rs leverages rust crates overrider and proc_use to provide an easy to write and powerful plugin system. The end-result are plugins which are dead-simple to enable.
For a list of available plugins and more info on enabling plugins, run make plugins.
For more info on developing plugins, read the plugin guide.

Requirements

• Xlib header files
• Cargo / rustc
• A working C compiler

Installation

Standalone

Edit config.mk to match your local setup (dmenu is installed into the /usr/local namespace by default).

Afterwards enter the following command to build dmenu:
make
Then, to install (if necessary as root):
make install

Distros

dmenu-rs is available from the following sources: - Arch AUR - stable branch
- Arch AUR - development branch

If you'd like for this to be available on another distro, raise an issue or submit a pull request with a README change pointing to the released package.

Running dmenu

See the man page for details. For a quick test, run:
make test

^[1]: According to valgrind(1)