Tofi
An extremely fast and simple dmenu / rofi replacement for wlroots-based Wayland compositors such as Sway.
The aim is to do just what I want it to as quick as possible.
When configured correctly, tofi can get on screen within a single frame.
Table of Contents
Install
Building
Install the necessary dependencies, e.g. for Arch:
# Runtime dependencies
sudo pacman -S freetype2 harfbuzz cairo pango wayland libxkbcommon
# Build-time dependencies
sudo pacman -S meson scdoc wayland-protocolsThen build:
meson build && ninja -C build installArch
Tofi is available in the AUR:
paru -S tofiUsage
By default, running tofi causes it to act like dmenu, accepting options on
stdin and printing the selection to stdout.
tofi-run is a symlink to tofi, which will cause tofi to display a list of
executables under the user's $PATH.
tofi-drun is also a symlink to tofi, which will cause tofi to display a
list of applications found in desktop files as described by the Desktop Entry
Specification.
To use as a launcher for Sway, add something similar to the following to your Sway config file:
set $menu tofi-run | xargs swaymsg exec --
bindsym $mod+d exec $menu
For tofi-drun, there are two possible methods:
# Launch via Sway
set $drun tofi-drun | xargs swaymsg exec --
bindsym $mod+Shift+d exec $drun
# Launch directly
set $drun tofi-drun --drun-launch=true
bindsym $mod+Shift+d exec $drun
See the main manpage for more info.
Theming
Tofi supports a fair number of theming options - see the config file
manpage for a complete description. Theming is based on the
box model shown below:
This consists of a box with a border, border outlines and optionally rounded
corners. Text inside the box can either be laid out vertically:
╔═══════════════════╗
║ prompt input ║
║ result 1 ║
║ result 2 ║
║ ... ║
╚═══════════════════╝
or horizontally:
╔═══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ prompt input result 1 result 2 ... ║
╚═══════════════════════════════════════════╝
A few example themes are included and shown below. Note that you may need to tweak them to look correct on your display.
Performance
By default, tofi isn't really any faster than its alternatives. However, when configured correctly, it can startup and get on screen within a single frame, or about 2ms in the ideal case.
Options
In roughly descending order, the most important options for performance are:
-
--font- This is by far the most important option. By default, tofi uses Pango for font rendering, which (on Linux) looks up fonts via Fontconfig. Unfortunately, this font lookup is about as slow as wading through treacle (relatively speaking). On battery power on my laptop (Arch linux, AMD Ryzen 5 5600U), with ~10000 fonts as the output offc-list, loading a single font with Pango & Fontconfig takes ~120ms.The solution is to pass a path to a font file to
--font, e.g.--font /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoSansMono-Regular.ttf. Tofi will then skip any font searching, and use Harfbuzz and Cairo directly to load the font and display text. This massively speeds up startup (font loading takes <1ms). The (minor for me) downside is that any character not in the specified font won't render correctly, but unless you have commands (or items) with CJK characters or emojis in their names, that shouldn't be an issue. -
--width,--height- Larger windows take longer to draw (mostly just for the first frame). Again, on battery power on my laptop, drawing a fullscreen window (2880px × 1800px) takes ~20ms on the first frame, whereas a dmenu-like ribbon (2880px × 60px) takes ~1ms. -
--num-results- By default, tofi auto-detects how many results will fit in the window. This is quite tricky when--horizontal=trueis passed, and leads to a few ms slowdown (only in this case). Setting a fixed number of results will speed this up, but since this likely only applies to dmenu-like themes (which are already very quick) it's probably not worth setting this. -
--selection-match-color,--selection-background- Passing either of these options causes some more complex rendering to take place, again leading to a couple of ms slowdown. -
--hint-font- Getting really into it now, one of the remaining slow points is hinting fonts. For the dmenu theme on battery power on my laptop, with a specific font file chosen, the initial text render with the default font hinting takes ~4-6ms. Specifying--hint-font falsedrops this to ~1ms. For hidpi screens or large font sizes, this doesn't noticeably impact font sharpness, but your mileage may vary. This option has no effect if a path to a font file hasn't been passed to--font. -
--late-keyboard-init- The last avoidable thing that slows down startup is initialisation of the keyboard. This only takes 1-2ms on my laptop, but up to 60ms on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Passing this option will delay keyboard initialisation until after the first draw to screen, meaning that keypresses will be missed until then, so it's disabled by default.
Benchmarks
Below are some rough benchmarks of the included themes on different machines.
The time shown is measured from program launch to Sway reporting that the
window has entered the screen. Results are the mean and standard deviation of
10 runs. All tests were performed with --font /path/to/font/file.ttf and
--hint-font false.
| Theme | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fullscreen | dmenu | dos | ||
| Machine | Ryzen 7 3700X 2560px × 1440px |
9.5ms ± 1.8ms | 5.2ms ± 1.5ms | 6.1ms ± 1.3ms |
| Ryzen 5 5600U (AC) 2880px × 1800px |
17.1ms ± 1.4ms | 4.0ms ± 0.5ms | 6.7ms ± 1.1ms | |
| Ryzen 5 5600U (battery) 2880px × 1800px |
28.1ms ± 3.7ms | 6.0ms ± 1.6ms | 12.3ms ± 3.4ms | |
| Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W 1920px × 1080px |
119.0ms ± 5.9ms | 67.3ms ± 10.2ms | 110.0ms ± 10.3ms | |
The table below additionally includes --late-keyboard-init in the arguments.
| Theme | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fullscreen | dmenu | dos | ||
| Machine | Ryzen 7 3700X 2560px × 1440px |
7.9ms ± 1.0ms | 2.3ms ± 0.8ms | 3.8ms ± 0.8ms |
| Ryzen 5 5600U (AC) 2880px × 1800px |
13.4ms ± 0.8ms | 2.6ms ± 0.5ms | 5.5ms ± 0.51ms | |
| Ryzen 5 5600U (battery) 2880px × 1800px |
21.8ms ± 1.8ms | 3.6ms ± 0.7ms | 8.1ms ± 0.7ms | |
| Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W 1920px × 1080px |
98.3ms ± 5.7ms | 44.8ms ± 16.3ms | 87.4ms ± 9.9ms | |
Bonus Round: Transparent HugePages
It turns out that it's possible to speed up fullscreen windows somewhat with
some advanced memory tweaks. See this Stack Overflow
question
if you want full details, but basically by setting
/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/shmem_enabled to advise, we can tell
the kernel we're going to be working with large memory areas. This results in
fewer page faults when first allocating memory, speeding up tofi.
Note that I don't recommend you play with this unless you know what you're doing (I don't), but I've included it just in case, and to show that the slowdown on large screens is partially due to factors beyond tofi's control.
The table below shows the effects of additionally enabling hugepages from the table above. The dmenu theme has been skipped, as the window it creates is too small to benefit from them. The Raspberry Pi is also omitted, as it doesn't support hugepages.
| Theme | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| fullscreen | dos | ||
| Machine | Ryzen 7 3700X 2560px × 1440px |
6.9ms ± 1.1ms | 3.2ms ± 0.4ms |
| Ryzen 5 5600U (AC) 2880px × 1800px |
7.9ms ± 1.2ms | 3.4ms ± 1.0ms | |
| Ryzen 5 5600U (battery) 2880px × 1800px |
13.7ms ± 0.9ms | 5.6ms ± 0.8ms | |