dmenu

dmenu is a dynamic, keyboard-driven menu for the X Window System, developed as part of the suckless.org project. It provides a small, minimal interface for selecting text items. dmenu reads a list of options from standard input, displays them in a compact window, and filters the list in real time as the user types. When a selection is made, dmenu prints the chosen item to standard output and exits. Its simple design makes it a popular launcher component for tiling window managers and scriptable workflows.

Typical usage involves piping a list into dmenu or using wrapper scripts such as dmenu_run and dmenu_path. For example, dmenu_path | dmenu -p "Run: " lets the user pick a command from PATH, after which the chosen text can be executed by a shell. A common pattern is to capture the selection and run it, for instance by piping the output into a shell command. Options control the prompt, the number of visible lines, and matching behavior (for example, case-insensitive matching). Appearance can be customized at runtime with font and color options, such as -fn for font and -nb/-nf/-sb/-sf for normal and selected colors. dmenu is typically built from source, and patches are widely used to add features like scrolling, multi-line displays, or layout tweaks.

Dmenu emphasizes simplicity and speed and remains a staple in lightweight X11 environments, often paired with window managers like dwm, i3, or others. It serves as a general-purpose launcher and can be adapted to a range of text-input tasks through its minimal, scriptable interface.