Le 25/12/2023 à 04:52, Steve Litt a écrit :
> As far as launching apps, the way I do it is with dmenu from Suckless
> Tools. If you're a keyboard kinda person, dmenu is by far the fastest
> and most efficient way to launch apps.
Le 24/12/2023 à 21:27, Gianluca Zoni via Dng a écrit :
> over a decade ago I started using StumpWM. Desktop environments
> are a waste of time: you have to gesture to make yourself
> understood by the computer, when we can talk to it or give it the
> right commands by typing key combinations in a single "musical
> chord" on the keyboard. StumpWM is programmable and integrates
> seamlessly with Emacs, Mutt, Conkeror, ... especially because
> over the years I've built an entire system of scripts and
> programs that I call the "zigzag system".

    You both, what you achieved is the result of a lot of configuration
and scripting work. Instead, any DE works almost fine out of the box and
is configurable through a menu.

    I think the general answer to the original question is that heavily
using menus is less efficient than heavily using command-line, but, on
the other hand, a menu is self-documenting, therefore, more efficient
for applications you rarely use. For example, a terminal emulator is the
very interface for command-line, but do you like to spend days in
customizing its apearance? No, this very task you do only once is more
efficiently done through a menu.

    In Xterm, everything is configurable through one zilion
command-line options, which, in practice would imply to RTFM and write
one's own script to start it, because it does not read a config file.
Konsole, Gnome-terminal or Xfce4-terminal, what more are they than
front-ends to Xterm with config files and menu-driven configuration.

    For what regards Dmenu, in all DEs there is an application menu for
all applications which are "integrated" in the Freedesktop sense, which
just means they come with a .desktop file stored in
/usr/share/applications/ . Do you, Steve, find it feasible to
automatically read all the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications/
and build a Dmenu tree for all of them? Each .desktop file includes a
"category" which drives the structure of the menu as a two-level tree. I
think this kind of tool might boost the adoption of Dmenu.

--     Didier