The Blog of Bob Rubbens
dmenu is a tool for
showing a dynamic menu at the top of your screen from the command line.
You feed it some options over stdin, separated by newlines,
which it then lists:
You can then type which option you want, and dmenu will try to match
your input to the closest option. When your press enter, it will print
the chosen option to stdout. A classic example of the unix
philosophy.
As a standalone program, it’s not directly useful. However, as a reusable component it can make any automation task more interactive, without having to pull in a boatload of dependencies. dmenu is small, generally available via most package managers, and in a pinch easy to compile yourself.
I’m always looking for oppurtinities to use dmenu. I don’t write that many automation scripts, but there are two particular tasks in my PhD folder that I’m using dmenu for frequently. These are scripts for opening PDFs from my bibliography and for looking up latex documentation.
I’ve set up a keybinding to show me a bibliography listing using dmenu when I press Super+0:
The script dmenu-pubs.sh first gets a
list of entries from pubs and
then gives them to dmenu for display. When dmenu prints which entry the
user selected, I extract the citation key with a regular expression and
instruct pubs to open that PDF. Short and simple! Any time I read a
document for more than five minutes, I usually put it in my pubs
database. With the pubs_dmenu.sh script it’s easy for me to
re-open the PDF when I want to reference it later on.
This script dmenu-texdoc.sh is still
a bit incomplete, but it’s already helpful. Essentially I’m using dmenu
to allow typing in a package name. I then pass this to
texdoc to open the documentation related to the user
input:
I’ve got this bound to the Super+t key combination. I use it all the time when writing articles and presentations in LaTeX.
The script is not very precise; sometimes it opens a different piece of documentation than I was expecting. In the future I’d like to extend the script to list all available packages, and to allow the user to choose if they want the fuzzy matching done by texdoc, or open the documentation of a given package name (and fail if that package does not exist).
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