Rofi started as clone of simpleswitcher, written by Sean Pringle a popup window switcher roughly based on superswitcher. Simpleswitcher laid the foundations and therefor Sean Pringle deserves most of the credit for this tool. Rofi, renamed as it lost the simple property, has been extended with extra features, like a application launcher, ssh-launcher and can act as a drop-in dmenu replacement, making it a very versatile tool.
Rofi, like dmenu, will provide the user with a textual list of options where one or more can be selected. This can either be, running an application, selecting a window or options provided by an external script.
It main features are:
- Fully configurable keyboard navigation.
- Type to filter
- Tokenized: Type any word in any order to filter.
- (toggable) Case insensitive.
- Supports fuzzy, regex and glob matching.
- UTF-8 enabled.
- UTF-8 aware string collating.
- intl. keyboard support (`e -> è)
- RTL language support.
- Cairo drawing and Pango font rendering.
- Build in modes:
- Window switcher mode.
- EWMH compatible WM.
- Application launcher.
- Desktop File Application launcher.
- SSH launcher mode.
- Combi mode, allow several modes to be merged into one list.
- Window switcher mode.
- History based ordering last 25 choices are ordered on top based on use. (optional)
- Levenshtein distance ordering of matches. (optional)
- Drop in dmenu replacement.
- With many added improvements.
- Can be easily extended using scripts.
- Themeing.
Rofi has several buildin modes implementing common use-cases and can be exteneded by scripts (either called from Rofi or calling Rofi).
Below the different modes are listed:
The window switcher shows the following informations in columns (can be customized):
- Desktop name
- Window class.
- Window title.
Window mode features:
- Closing applications by hitting
Shift-Delete. - Custom command by
Shift-Return
The run mode allows users to quickly search and launch a program.
Run mode features:
- Shift-Return to run the selected program in a terminal.
- Favorites list, frequently used programs are sorted on top.
- Execute command to add custom entries, like aliases.
The desktop run mode allows users to quickly search and launch an application from the freedesktop.org Desktop Entries. These are used by most common Desktop Environments to populate launchers and menus. Drun mode features:
- Favorites list, frequently used programs are sorted on top.
- Auto starting terminal applications in a terminal.
Quickly ssh into remote machines
- Parses ~/.ssh/config to find hosts.
Loads external scripts to add modes to Rofi, for example a file-browser.
rofi -show fb -modi fb:../Examples/rofi-file-browser.sh
Combine multiple modes in one view. This is especially usefull when merging the window and run mode into one view. Allowing to quickly switch to an application, either by switching to it when it is already running or starting it.
Example to combine Desktop run and the window switcher:
rofi -combi-modi window,drun -show combi -modi combi
Drop in dmenu replacement. (Screenshot shows rofi used by teiler ).
Rofi features several improvements over dmenu to improve usability. There is the option to add
an extra message bar (-mesg), pre-entering of text (-filter) or selecting entries based on a
pattern (-select). Also highlighting (-u and -a) options and modi to force user to select one
provided option (-only-match). In addition to this rofi's dmenu mode can select multiple lines and
write them to stdout.
If used with -show [mode], rofi will immediately open in the specified [mode]
If used with -dmenu, rofi will use data from STDIN to let the user select an option.
For example to show a run dialog:
rofi -show run
Show a ssh dialog:
rofi -show ssh
If passed the -dmenu option, or ran as dmenu (ie, /usr/bin/dmenu is symlinked to /usr/bin/rofi),
rofi will use the data passed from STDIN.
~/scripts/my_script.sh | rofi -dmenu
echo -e "Option #1\nOption #2\nOption #3" | rofi -dmenu
In both cases, rofi will output the user's selection to STDOUT.
Type Shift-/Left/Right to switch between active modi.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Ctrl-v, Insert |
Paste clipboard |
Ctrl-Shift-v, Shift-Insert |
Paste primary selection |
Ctrl-w |
Clear the line |
Ctrl-u |
Delete till the start of line |
Ctrl-a |
Move to beginning of line |
Ctrl-e |
Move to end of line |
Ctrl-f, Right |
Move forward one character |
Alt-f |
Move forward one word |
Ctrl-b, Left |
Move back one character |
Alt-b |
Move back one word |
Ctrl-d, Delete |
Delete character |
Ctrl-Alt-d |
Delete word |
Ctrl-h, Backspace |
Backspace (delete previous character) |
Ctrl-Alt-h |
Delete previous word |
Ctrl-j,Ctrl-m,Enter |
Accept entry |
Ctrl-n,Down |
Select next entry |
Ctrl-p,Up |
Select previous entry |
Page Up |
Go to the previous page |
Page Down |
Go to the next page |
Ctrl-Page Up |
Go to the previous column |
Ctrl-Page Down |
Go to the next column |
Ctrl-Enter |
Use entered text as command (in ssh/run modi) |
Shift-Enter |
Launch the application in a terminal (in run mode) |
Shift-Enter |
Return the selected entry and move to the next item while keeping Rofi open. (in dmenu) |
Shift-Right |
Switch to the next modi. The list can be customized with the -modi option. |
Shift-Left |
Switch to the previous modi. The list can be customized with the -modi option. |
Ctrl-Tab |
Switch to the next modi. The list can be customized with the -modi option. |
Ctrl-Shift-Tab |
Switch to the previous modi. The list can be customized with the -modi option. |
Ctrl-space |
Set selected item as input text. |
Shift-Del |
Delete entry from history. |
grave |
Toggle case sensitivity. |
Alt-grave |
Toggle levenshtein sort. |
Alt-Shift-S |
Take a screenshot and store this in the Pictures directory. |
For the full list of keybindings see: rofi -show keys or rofi -help.
There are currently three methods of setting configuration options:
- Local configuration. Normally, depending on XDG, in
~/.local/rofi/config. This uses the Xresources format. - Xresources: A method of storing key values in the Xserver. See here for more information.
- Commandline options: Arguments passed to Rofi.
A distribution can ship defaults in /etc/rofi.conf.
The Xresources options and the commandline options are aliased. To define option X set:
rofi.X: value
In the Xresources file. To set/override this from commandline pass the same key prefixed with '-':
rofi -X value
To get a list of available options, formatted as Xresources entries run:
rofi -dump-Xresources
or in a more readable format
rofi -help
The configuration system supports the following types:
- String
- Integer (signed and unsigned)
- Char
- Boolean
The boolean option has a non-default commandline syntax, to enable option X you do:
rofi -X
to disable it:
rofi -no-X
For more detailed information, please see the manpage, the wiki or the forum.
Please see the installation guide for instruction on how to install Rofi.
Rofi is not:
- A preview application. In other words, it will not show a (small) preview of image, movie or other files.
- A UI toolkit.
- A library to be used in other applications.
- An application that can support every possible use-case. It tries to generic enough to be usable by everybody. Specific functionality can be added using scripts.
- Just a dmenu replacement. The dmenu functionality is a nice 'extra' to rofi not it main purpose.