A keyboard-only application launcher for macOS, inspired by dmenu.
Press a hotkey, type a few letters, hit Enter. No Spotlight indexing, no mouse, no waiting.
Requires macOS 13.5 or later.
With Homebrew:
brew install dmenu-macWith Nix, from nixpkgs-unstable (stable channels get it from 26.11):
nix profile install nixpkgs#dmenu-macWith nix-darwin or home-manager, add pkgs.dmenu-mac to environment.systemPackages or home.packages. They link the app into /Applications/Nix Apps or ~/Applications/Home Manager Apps. The package installs the same signed release, so it can lag a few days behind a new version.
Or download the latest dmenu-mac.zip from the releases page, unzip it, and move dmenu-mac.app to /Applications. Releases are signed and notarized by Apple.
To call dmenu-mac from scripts, put dmenu-mac.app/Contents/Resources/dmenu-mac on your PATH. Homebrew and Nix do this for you.
- Open dmenu-mac. It lives in the menu bar and waits for its hotkey. The first time, a short setup walks you through the hotkey, launching at login, and terminal programs. Every step can be skipped (Enter continues, Esc skips), and you can run it again from the menu bar icon with Run Setup Again…. It does not appear when dmenu-mac is started from a shell or a script.
- Press ⌘ Space anywhere to bring up the launcher.
- Start typing. Matching is fuzzy and case-insensitive, so
safristill finds Safari. Things you open often and recently rank higher, and come first before you type anything. - Press Enter to open the highlighted result, or Esc to dismiss.
Tip: dmenu-mac is best paired with Spotlight's shortcut turned off (System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Spotlight), or pick a different hotkey in dmenu-mac's settings.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| ⌘ Space | Show the launcher (configurable) |
| Tab / → | Move to the next result |
| Shift Tab / ← | Move to the previous result |
| Enter | Open the selected result, or run what you typed when nothing matches |
| Shift Enter | Run what you typed even if there are matches |
| ⌘ Enter | Reveal the selected app, pane, or program in Finder |
| ⌥ Enter | Copy the selected item's path to the clipboard |
| ⌃ Enter | Open a new instance of the selected app |
| Esc | Hide the launcher |
| ⌘ , | Open Settings |
The launcher does not steal focus: the app you were in stays in front and gets the keyboard back as soon as the bar closes.
- Apps in
/Applications,/System/Applications, and~/Applications, including symlinked folders such as the ones nix-darwin and home-manager create. - Bundled utilities like Keychain Access, Archive Utility, and Directory Utility.
- System Settings panes, so
dispopens Displays andnetopens Network. - Optionally, command-line programs from your
$PATH(see below).
The list refreshes on its own when apps are installed or removed.
Results are ranked by how well they match, nudged by how often and how recently you've opened each one. Usage fades over a few weeks, so old habits drop back down. Menus piped in from scripts are never recorded.
Give anything in the list a short keyword in Settings → Aliases, such as ff for Firefox or term for Ghostty. Typing the alias exactly (in any case) puts its target first, ahead of the usual fuzzy matches, and partial typing like ter still lists it. Aliases don't apply to menus piped in on stdin.
If nothing matches what you typed, Enter runs the text as a shell command in your login shell, from your home directory. mpv ~/Movies/clip.mp4 plays a video without opening a terminal. Shift Enter does the same even when something matches.
To launch nvim, htop, ranger, and friends in a terminal window:
- Open Settings → General and turn on List programs from $PATH.
- Pick your terminal: Terminal, iTerm2, Ghostty, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, or a custom command where
{cmd}is replaced by the program to run.
Programs from your login shell's $PATH (Homebrew, nix, ~/.local/bin, ...) then show up alongside apps, and typed commands like nvim notes.md open in that terminal too. The first time Terminal or iTerm2 is used, macOS asks to let dmenu-mac control it; the setup offers to ask up front instead.
Type a keyword, a space, and a query to search the web or ask an LLM. g swift actors puts Search Google for 'swift actors' at the top of the list, and Enter opens it in your default browser.
| Keyword | Opens |
|---|---|
g |
|
ddg |
DuckDuckGo |
ghs |
GitHub search |
yt |
YouTube |
w |
Wikipedia |
c |
Claude |
gpt, chatgpt |
ChatGPT |
p |
Perplexity |
cc |
claude "<prompt>" in your terminal (Claude Code) |
cx |
codex "<prompt>" in your terminal (Codex) |
Edit them in Settings → Shortcuts. Each shortcut has a keyword, a name, a template, and where it opens:
- Browser:
{query}in the template is replaced by what you typed, URL-encoded, e.g.https://www.google.com/search?q={query}. - Terminal:
{query}is replaced by what you typed, shell-quoted, and the command runs in the terminal picked in Settings → General, e.g.claude {query}.
Keywords are case-insensitive. If a keyword is also a program listed from your $PATH, its shortcut is listed after the other matches. Shift Enter always runs what you typed, even when a shortcut matches. Shortcuts are off when a list is piped in.
Open Settings with ⌘ , while the launcher is up, or from the menu bar icon.
- General: the global hotkey, Launch at login, and the terminal setup described above.
- Aliases: short keywords for items in the list (see above).
- Shortcuts: the search keywords described above. Restore Defaults brings back the built-in set.
- Appearance: bar position (top or bottom of the screen), which screen it appears on (the one with the active window, the one with the mouse pointer, or the primary screen; the bar spans the full width, below the menu bar and above a bottom Dock), opacity, Show icons (app and System Settings icons next to their names, off by default), colors for the text, selection, and background, and the font and its size. Reset to Defaults undoes it all.
The menu bar icon also lets you show the launcher, run the setup again, and quit.
The dmenu-mac command takes a few flags, which makes it usable from scripts and hotkey daemons:
dmenu-mac --help| Flag | Effect |
|---|---|
-p, --prompt <text> |
Show a prompt instead of the search field |
-b, --bottom |
Show the bar at the bottom of the screen for this run |
-m, --monitor <n> |
Show the bar on screen n for this run, counting from 0 in macOS's display order; only 0 (the primary screen) is guaranteed to stay the same, and indexes with no screen are ignored |
--no-custom |
Only accept items from the list; typed text that matches nothing is ignored |
--exit / --no-exit |
Quit after a selection, or stay in the background |
Pipe a list of choices in and the selection is printed to stdout, just like dmenu:
choice=$(printf 'Yes\nNo' | dmenu-mac -p "Are you sure?")When nothing matches (or with Shift Enter) the typed text is printed instead, unless you pass --no-custom. Pressing Esc prints nothing and exits with status 1.
When started from a shell or a hotkey daemon such as skhd, dmenu-mac exits as soon as you pick something or press Esc, so it can be bound to a key without leaving processes behind:
# ~/.config/skhd/skhdrc
alt - space : dmenu-mac
When opened as an app (Finder, Dock, Launch at Login) it stays running and waits for its hotkey. Use --exit or --no-exit to force either behaviour.
Spotlight has to index everything on disk, and on machines with a lot of files that keeps the CPU busy and the results slow. dmenu-mac only looks at your application folders, so it starts instantly, needs no index, and keeps working with Spotlight disabled entirely.
xcodebuild -skipPackagePluginValidation -skipMacroValidation \
-project dmenu-mac.xcodeproj -scheme dmenu-mac -configuration Debug test
# single test: add -only-testing:dmenu-macTests/SearchServiceTests[/testName]
swiftlint --strict # CI fails on warnings-skipPackagePluginValidation is required because SwiftLint runs as an Xcode build plugin.
Releases are cut with scripts/release.sh, see RELEASING.md.
Bug reports and pull requests are welcome.
GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.