dmenu is an efficient dynamic menu for X. This is my personal fork with a few useful patches.
I've removed a bit of code that prevented colored fonts from being loaded. However, that piece of code existed for good reason; the current upstream font rendering library, libXft does not support colored fonts. There exists a patch which adds support, but it has not been merged in. You must install a patched version of libXft or this dmenu fork may have issues. On Arch Linux it exists packaged on the AUR as libxft-bgra.
The standard center patch on suckless.org is extremely slow when reading large
files because it reads all items, then loops through to determine the string
length before displaying a window. This patch implements centering, but does
not calculate a width automatically. Instead you may manually pass in a width
using the new -z flag.
Allows setting a window border. Helps make the window standout a bit. Size can be configured in config.h
This patch adds support for fuzzy-matching to dmenu, allowing users to type
non-consecutive portions of the string to be matched. It can be turned off
with the -F flag.
I've added a new helper script for use with my dprint tool. My
dprint program is a replacement for the
standard "listing your entire $PATH" approach to launching programs. Instead it
prints from .desktop files allowing you to customize the names of entries
seperate from the command they run. Additionally, it creates a cache and lists
programs by how often you run them by default.
I added the xresources patch. You can now configure font and colors with
xresources without needing to recompile. These are the options you may put in
your ~/.Xresources remember to run xrdb ~/.Xresource after changing it:
dmenu.font : font or font set
dmenu.background : normal background color
dmenu.foreground : normal foreground color
dmenu.selbackground : selected background color
dmenu.selforeground : selected foreground color
In order to build dmenu you need the Xlib header files.
doas apk add libx11-dev libxinerama-dev libxft-bgra-dev
Note: This is slightly different than upstream dmenu. You must use a patched
version of libXft such as
libxft-bgra. This will allow
using colored emoji fonts.
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 and install dmenu (if necessary as root):
make clean install
See the man page for details.