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dmenu is a fast and lightweight dynamic menu for X. It reads arbitrary text from stdin, and creates a menu with one item for each line. The user can then select an item, through the arrow keys or typing a part of the name, and the line is printed to stdout. dmenu_run is a wrapper that ships with the dmenu distribution that allows its use as an application launcher.

## Installation

Install the dmenu package, or dmenu-gitAUR for the development version.

Various patched variants exist which extend dmenu's default functionality. Consider installing dmenu2AUR, a dmenu fork with many useful patches applied and additional capabilities added including dimming, specifying a custom opacity, and underlining.

You may run dmenu with:

    $ dmenu_run

## Configuration

Now, you will want to attach the `dmenu_run` command to a keystroke combination. This can be done either via your window manager or desktop environment configuration, or with a program like xbindkeys. See the Hotkeys article for more information.

### Displaying custom items

Custom items will be shown by separating them with a new line (\n) and piping them into dmenu. For example:

    $ echo -e "first\nsecond\nthird" | dmenu

### Manually adding items

dmenu will look for executables in the directories defined in your `$PATH`. For information on modifying your `$PATH` see environment variables.

### Fonts

dmenu can display fonts using XFT. This example will run dmenu using ttf-droid:

    $ dmenu_run -fn 'Droid Sans Mono-9'

### Support for shell aliases

dmenu does not support shell aliases. To have dmenu recognize your aliases, install the dmenu-recent-aliases-gitAUR package and run `dmenu-recent-aliases`. Your aliases must be in `~/.bash_aliases` to be recognized by dmenu-recent-aliases.

### Support for history

To sort commands by recency, download dmenu_run_history to your `$PATH` and use `dmenu_run_history` instead of `dmenu_run`.

## Tips and tricks

### Taking input using dmenu

Inside a script (e.g. launched from a shortcut), getting user input is sometimes required. We can use dmenu for this, by passing it an EOF: the selection field will be empty and dmenu can take user input.

Since reading `/dev/null` will return an EOF, this can simply be done by the following command:

    $ dmenu < /dev/null

### Embedding in current terminal

Dmenu can be embeded inside any window using the `-w id` option.

To embed it inside the currenctly active window (like for example the terminal it is being run from), use xdo to get its id:

    $ echo hello | dmenu -w $(xdo id)

## Troubleshooting

### No locale support

Running dmenu_run results in the following error message:

    $ dmenu_run

    no locale support

Make sure that the environment variable `LANG` is correctly set. See the following for more information: Locale#Troubleshooting

### Missing menu entries

If certain entries are missing from dmenu, the cache may be malformed. Delete it and restart dmenu.

    $ rm ~/.dmenu_cache
    $ rm ~/.cache/dmenu_run

Note that there will most likely be only one cache file, depending on if `$XDG_CACHE_HOME` is set. See the contents of `/usr/bin/dmenu_run` for more information.

### Environment variables

Environment variables needed for applications should instead be added to `/etc/environment`.

## See also

- dmenu – The official dmenu website
- Dmenu Hacking thread – Dmenu hacking thread in Arch Linux forum. An overview of scripts is provided in the dmenu_scripts collection.

Categories:

- Application launchers
- Suckless