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.

Install
- Building
- Arch
Usage
- Theming
Performance
- Options
- Benchmarks

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-protocols

Then build:

meson build && ninja -C build install

Arch

Tofi is available in the AUR:

paru -S tofi

Usage

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.

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

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.

themes/fullscreen

themes/dmenu

themes/dos

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 of fc-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.
--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 false drops 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

ton/tofi