rofi-dmenu(5)

✨ rofi-dmenu(5) ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to the File Formats Manual page for rofi-dmenu — this is the whole entire guide to rofi's dmenu emulation mode, and I promise it's gonna slay 💅

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💖 NAME 💖

rofi dmenu mode — rofi dmenu emulation, aka the moment rofi puts on its dmenu costume and honestly? It eats. 🎀

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the vibe: if you want to drop rofi into your scripts as a simple selection dialog, rofi has your back — it literally supports emulating dmenu(1) (which, for the record, is A dynamic menu for X11). Iconic of it. ✨

The website for dmenu can be found here (http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) — go look, iykyk.

Now, real talk: rofi does not aim to be 100% compatible with dmenu. There are simply too many flavors of dmenu, like… there's a whole buffet of them 😭. The idea is that the basic usage command-line flags are obeyed, and theme-related flags are not. Besides that, rofi offers some extended features — think multi-select, highlighting, message bar, extra key bindings. main character energy fr fr 👑

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🌸 BASIC CONCEPT 🌸

In dmenu mode, rofi reads data from standard in, splits them into separate entries, and displays them. Then if the user selects a row, that row is printed out to standard out — which lets your script process it further. Chef's kiss. 🫶

By default, separation of rows is done on new lines, making it super easy to pipe the output of one application into rofi and the output of rofi into the next. A little pipeline romance, honestly. 💖

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🧚 USAGE 🧚

Launch rofi with the -dmenu flag and boom — it goes into dmenu emulation mode. That's it, that's the trick:

ls | rofi -dmenu

🎀 DMENU DROP-IN REPLACEMENT 🎀

If argv[0] (aka the calling command) is dmenu, rofi will start in dmenu mode. So you can genuinely use it as a drop-in replacement for dmenu — just copy or symlink rofi to dmenu in $PATH. Sneaky, brilliant, obsessed. 💅

ln -s /usr/bin/rofi /usr/bin/dmenu

🌈 DMENU VS SCRIPT MODE 🌈

Okay so don't confuse these two, bestie: script mode is used to extend rofi, and dmenu mode is used to extend a script. They actually do share much of the same input format. Please see the rofi-script(5) manpage for more info. 📖

⭐ DMENU SPECIFIC COMMANDLINE FLAGS ⭐

A lot of these options can also be modified by the script using special input — check the rofi-script(5) manpage for more about that syntax. But here's the full rundown, no skips, no skimps 🔥

• -sep separator — Separator for dmenu. Example: to show a list of a to e with | as a separator:

echo "a|b|c|d|e" | rofi -sep '|' -dmenu

• -p prompt — Specify the prompt to show in dmenu mode. For example, select monkey, a,b,c,d, or e.

echo "a|b|c|d|e" | rofi -sep '|' -dmenu -p "monkey"

Default: dmenu

• -l number of lines to show — Maximum number of lines the menu may show before scrolling. So yeah, past that it's scroll city 🌀

rofi -dmenu -l 25

Default: 15

• -i — Makes dmenu searches case-insensitive. tiny lowercase gremlin mode, love her 🙈
• -a X — Active row, mark X as active. Where X is a comma-separated list of python(1)-style indices and ranges, e.g. indices start at 0, -1 refers to the last row with -2 preceding it, ranges are left-open and right-close, and so on. You can specify:
  • A single row: 5
  • A range of (last 3) rows: -3:
  • 4 rows starting from row 7: 7:11 (or in legacy notation: 7-10)
  • A set of rows: 2,0,-9
  • Or any combination: 5,-3:,7:11,2,0,-9
• -u X — Urgent row, mark X as urgent. See -a option for details. 🚨
• -only-match — Only return a selected item, do not allow custom entry. This mode always returns an entry. It will not return if no matching entry is selected. No vibes-based freeform typing here, sorry 💀
• -no-custom — Only return a selected item, do not allow custom entry. This mode returns directly when no entries given.
• -format format — Allows the output of dmenu to be customized (N is the total number of input entries):
  • s selected string
  • i index (0 - (N-1))
  • d index (1 - N)
  • q quote string
  • p Selected string stripped from Pango markup (Needs to be a valid string)
  • f filter string (user input)
  • F quoted filter string (user input)

Default: s

• -select string — Select first line that matches the given string. first come, first served bestie ✨
• -mesg string — Add a message line below the filter entry box. Supports Pango markup. For more information on supported markup, see here (https://docs.gtk.org/Pango/pango_markup.html)
• -dump — Dump the filtered list to stdout and quit. This can be used to get the list as rofi would filter it. Use together with -filter command. little peek behind the curtain 🫣
• -input file — Reads from file instead of stdin.
• -password — Hide the input text. > okay but seriously — this should not be considered secure! Do not trust it with your secrets, bestie, i'm begging 😭
• -markup-rows — Tell rofi that DMenu input is Pango markup encoded, and should be rendered. See here (https://docs.gtk.org/Pango/pango_markup.html) for details about Pango markup.
• -multi-select — Allow multiple lines to be selected. Adds a small selection indicator to the left of each entry. go off, select five things at once 👑
• -sync — Force rofi mode to first read all data from stdin before showing the selection window. This is original dmenu behavior.

Note: the default asynchronous mode will also be automatically disabled if used with conflicting options, such as -dump, -only-match or -auto-select.

• -window-title title — Set name used for the window title. Will be shown as Rofi - title
• -w windowid — Position rofi over the window with the given X11 window ID.
• -keep-right — Set ellipsize mode to start. So, the end of the string is visible. show me the end of the sentence, i need closure 😤
• -display-columns — A comma seperated list of columns to show.
• -display-column-separator — The column separator. This is a regex.

default: ’

• -ballot-selected-str string — When multi-select is enabled, prefix this string when element is selected.

default: “☑”

• -ballot-unselected-str string — When multi-select is enabled, prefix this string when element is not selected.

default: “☐”

• -ellipsize-mode (start|middle|end) — Set ellipsize mode on the listview.

default “end”

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🍓 PARSING ROW OPTIONS 🍓

Extra options for individual rows can be also set! See the rofi-script(5) manpage for details — the syntax and supported features are identical. same energy, different page 💜

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💀 RETURN VALUE 💀

• 0: Row has been selected accepted by user. 🎉
• 1: User cancelled the selection. 💔
• 10-28: Row accepted by custom keybinding. ⌨️

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🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

rofi(1), rofi-sensible-terminal(1), dmenu(1), rofi-theme(5), rofi-script(5), rofi-theme-selector(1), ascii(7) — go read them all, or at least the ones you need, no pressure bestie 🦋

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

• Qball Cow <qball@gmpclient.org>
• Rasmus Steinke <rasi@xssn.at>
• Morgane Glidic <sardemff7+rofi@sardemff7.net>
• Original code based on work by: Sean Pringle <sean.pringle@gmail.com>

For a full list of authors, check the AUTHORS file. 📜

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this gorgeous thing ships as part of rofi, manual page rofi-dmenu(5) — that's the source and the page name all wrapped up in a bow 🎀 mwah, go pipe something into a menu 💖✨