wirelessduck--- via Dng said on Fri, 13 Jun 2025 23:29:25 +1000


>I haven’t yet got into using dmenu so I’ve stuck with the
>xfce4-appfinder package hooked to alt+f2 and alt+f3 same as it was in
>XFCE. This one is good as it searches through .desktop application
>files in addition to $PATH. If I could get dmenu to somehow search
>.desktop files then I might give it another go.

You CAN get dmenu to search .desktop files, and here's how you do it:

I believe all your .desktop files are in your home directory and all
end in .desktop. If your needs would be satisfied by a simple sorting
of desktop files, you can pipe ls -1 ~/.desktop into dmenu, and do
whatever is required to run the chosen one.

But perhaps you want to actually work with stuff contained in the
.desktop files. This is a little harder. You can make a Python program
to open each, put all its information in sort order, sort it, and send
it to a cache file. But before doing that, you actually send the (old)
cache file into dmenu, and once the user chooses, THEN build the new
cache file. So very occasionally dmenu will work with a stale cache
file, but you just run it again. If you don't like the cache file idea,
you can write a C program that reads the .desktop files, puts each
record in the order you want it to sort, pipe it to sort, then redirect
the result to dmenu. The C program and sort program are so
instantaneous that you can dispense with the cache step and still
perceive no delay between pressing the hotkey and viewing the dmenu
result.

It would take a little work, but you could even mix the on-path
executables with the .desktop records.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com