MyMenu

A menu for Xorg, 'cause I was bored

---

What?

This is a simple menu for Xorg, like dmenu(1).

Why?

This was the perfect excuse to learn how to use Xlib.

How?

Check out the manpage for further documentation. Check out also the template for the resources.

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Features

• two layout: horizontal (a là dmenu) and vertical (a là rofi);
• highly customizable (width, height, position on the screen, colors, borders, ...);
• transparency support
• support for both Xft and bitmap font

Dependencies

• Xlib
• Xinerama for multi-monitor support
• Xft for TrueType font support
• pkg-config (optional) to aid the autoconfiguration
• mandoc (optional) to generate the markdown version of the manpage

Build

The usual spell:

$ ./configure
$ make

FAQ

• Does not run / Hangs

  At the startup mymenu will read stdin for a list of item, only then it'll display a window. Are you sure that you're passing something on standard input?

• Will feature $X be added?

  No. Or maybe yes. In fact, it depends. Open an issue and let's discuss. If it's something that's trivial to achieve in combo with other tool maybe is not the case to add it here.

• Is feature $Y present? What $Z do? How to achieve $W?

  Everything is documented in the man page. To read it, simply execute man -l mymenu.1 or mandoc mymenu.1 | less (depending on your system the -l option may not be present).

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Scripts

I'm using this script to launch MyMenu with custom item

#!/bin/sh

cat <<EOF | /bin/sh -c "$(mymenu "$@")"
sct 4500
lock
connect ethernet
connect home
connect phone
ZZZ
zzz
...
EOF

You can generate a list of executables from $PATH like this:

#!/bin/sh

path=`echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g'`

for p in $path; do
	for f in "$p"/*; do
		[ -x "$f" ] && echo "${f##*/}"
	done
done | sort -fu | /bin/sh -c "$(mymenu "$@")"

You can, for example, select a song to play from the current queue of amused

if song=$(amused show | mymenu -p "Song: " -A); then
	amused jump "$song"
fi

The same, but with mpd:

fmt="%position% %artist% - %title%"
if song=$(mpc playlist -f "$fmt" | mymenu -p "Song: " -A -d " "); then
	mpc play $(echo $song | sed "s/ .*$//")
fi

Of course you can as well use the dmenu_path and dmenu_run scripts that (usually) comes with dmenu.