Add An Applications Menu To Any Window Manager

Xmenu is a menu utility for X. Xmenu is a popup menu similar to the one found in Openbox, and it can be controlled via the mouse and/or via keyboard. Perfect for window managers that don't include a menu application.
REFERENCED:
► github.com/phillbush/xmenu
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Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!

[@remmidy2603]

I've been watching you for a few months and your walk throughs are straight to the point, you helped me with learning linux alot.

[@kellyrunnels5684]

Thanks DT! Great video, very helpful!

[@3Diego]

My dwm just got even better, thank you DT

[@benway123]

The King is back!

[@waltereikrem]

nice taste in VM's and a great taste in music. this channel has it all guys haha

[@horatiumarasescu6187]

Hey DT, I miss dearly the Taking into account series. It was my pleasure to listen to your point of view about tech industry events. What are the chances to have it back?

[@arafatrakib4954]

I really wanted to use openbox menu in other system. I have various pipe menus which i find easier to use than opening a terminal to to some stuff. Thanks for showing this menu. I'm gonna try this out. :)

[@Xeab]

Real neat, always liked to idea of the floating window-manager right-click menus, but never wanted to leave a tiling window manager.

[@Stephen-yd7ce]

Nice! will be adding this to qtile as soon as I get home.

[@AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Derek. I use Pop!_OS's Gnome but never use a menu. There's now a built in launcher but I use Albert. I liked the right-click on root window menu in Fluxbox and Xfce but rarely used it. Still, it's good to see how easy it would be to set up.

[@MissourHanzai]

Frankly, it looks useful but I already had a heart attack getting gnome-pie running and that takes care of most of my needs.

[@popperklopper5450]

I just pimped my i3-wm with xmenu. Thanks for this great video. Regards from Germany.

[@tecbs]

nice... I learn something new every day

[@austersimon]

That's really neat! Won't use it for application launching tho, but for scrot, config stuff and such...

[@oldominion8669]

Perfect, I was just thinking of something like this to have and your video showed up in my recommendations, is Google reading my mind now?

[@alexaognjanovic4127]

Small python script can take /usr/share/applications/*.desktop files and generate config

[@TheFakeVIP]

I wonder if you couldn't get xclickroot to work because you're running Nitrogen so you're not actually clicking on the X root window.

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

Thanks DT! When I do that key binding in my Spectrwm I get PMenu... Lol Great fined, will add that to my ever growing list of DT's things to do list... :-D LLAP

[@monolalia]

Just as a "btw", the "H" in "Herbstluft" is not silent.

[@AlphaNerdYT]

@Zachary Clinton please stop using this meme its not funny anymore

[@AlphaNerdYT]

@Zachary Clinton lets also just be honest installing arch is super easy and not like building your own system a 3yo could install it if you want to build a linux system try lfs its great

[@SadeeshSenevirathne]

@@AlphaNerdYT ur the definition of "i use lfs btw"

[@LunyaTheGay]

Is with "Herbstluff" the german word? I genuinely dont know as a german.

[@Blaishon]

Dude! I know this is a couple years old, but... I moved to linux a year ago and am not looking back. Been loving Mint Cinnamon. Still dual back to windows for games, but I live in Mint for work and home. Back in the NT4.0 days, we'd replace our desktop manager (back when windows was still configurable), which took the old start menu away. In its place I used a launcher called Back Menu. I have been hunting high and low for 30 years for something similar and xmenu is perfect! I think my install is now complete. Thanks for pointing the way and loved the vid. Checking out your others. For mint cinnamon users (maybe ubuntu in general, not sure), you're missing some libraries by default. Run these installs ahead of xmenu. Should help... sudo apt install libx11-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev libimlib2-dev -y

[@heavynetol]

Liked and subscribed. Hail to King Diamond! \m/

[@cschu2205]

Thanks Great ! Your channel is really cool ! i will use this app also with polybar :-)

[@polgzz]

Man, your sound setup. I typically whatch your videos with the phone laying around somewhere on the house and never thought about it. I happen to have a good set of AKG headphones and today I had a long trip by train and bring them with me. This is how that mic disserved to be listent to, haha. Soooo pleasant to the ear! Although... all that set-up... is it actually bloat??! 🤔

[@MetalCrazyGoat]

That’s a neat application, but I’ll stick with rofi. Flows better with a keyboard centric workflow.

[@DistroTube]

Different kinds of menus. This is more for the point and click crowd. Dmenu/rofi are keyboard driven.

[@yScribblezHD]

As someone who uses keyboard driven software in my workflow like 95% of the time, it is still useful to have mouse driven supplementary software for when I'm lounging in my chair or just browsing. That's just me personally though, I like having more options than just what suits my (by a wide margin) typical use case.

[@alexstone691]

@@yScribblezHD Note that rofi can be used with a mouse too

[@anshsrivastava1059]

I prefer the keyboard too, but while eating meals, using the keyboard gets annoying. A nice little addition to dmenu for me.

[@MetalCrazyGoat]

@@anshsrivastava1059 I personally do not eat at my computer, I spent way too much money building it to get it messy lol. I do have a laptop that I use in those instances, but if I find it's too inconvenient to use computer in a keyboard centric way while eating I just see it as an opportunity to take a little break from what I was working on

[@studiokadaver]

Awesome! Looks perfect for a i3 setup

[@auroradraco9974]

Interesting. I like dmenu for launching programs, or keybinding them to something if I use them too often. But this could find some use in my workflow possibly

[@chimak111]

DT's back on vim :D

[@byrongilbert3720]

Long live The King

[@cthedosboss5113]

Thanks dt :)

[@negritolindo8838]

I used something like morc, don't remember really. But it has rofi or dmenu as dependencies (maybe?)

[@nissengummihone]

Not related to the video, but I would love for you to check out the Sway window manager. It's basically i3 but for Wayland, and I haven't seen you cover Waylans on this channel before.

[@NoName-cm1fs]

Couldn't seem to get this to work with the Sapphire WM.

[@5dot2dot0dot5dot]

Is there a convenient way to populate the menu with .desktop files organised into the categories specified therein?

[@ThirumaleshHS1]

Nice Buddha 👌

[@SlideRSB]

I with think that there must be a way to generate a config by parsing all the .desktop files. Regardless, I'll just stick to my Rofi menu. That one also works in any window manager.

[@benary5620]

Can you please share your configuration? I particularly like the way it displays your last played music track and additional information about it. Great idea!

[@nykal1510]

Everything is on his GitHub, you should be able to find it somewhere on the channel, I can't quite remember it

[@xelonidas8574]

Can xmenu be spawned at fixed position? If so, it can run nicely with onclick button in tint2

[@DistroTube]

You can specify a position.

[@xelonidas8574]

I will take adventage of it. Thanks a lot!

[@wadecurry938]

With rofi or dmenu, you have to know about the program and its name. I install lots of programs just to try them out, so it's nice to have a menu driven interface to browse and (re)discover the available tools. Does xmenu deal well with HiDPI displays? I guess I'll find out.

[@perseusarkouda]

jgmenu. Best menu I could ever find.

[@millankumar9245]

Hey DT, can you look at Gentoo?

[@obsidian10101]

Hi there! Which distro are you using?

[@stasik1979]

2 thumbs up for King Diamond!

[@swollenaor]

first, i just like my whisker menu

[@adhalianna]

Same++, Whiskermenu is one of the main reasons I don't want to leave my Xfce. Looks great and works great both in keyboard-centric and point-and-click workflows. I'm running Manjaro i3 community version (with rofi instead of dmenu) on one of my laptops but spending more time with my PC made me realize how much I've been missing the Whiskermenu. Its visuals just make it quicker to launch any app. Now I'm working on a desktop (designing it for sb else actually) that integrates tightly bspwm into Xfce and I'm really enjoying the results!

[@Zoltar358]

Hey DT, fantastic video as usual :) I have a walkaround solution to get xmenu under the right mouse click, at least in i3wm. I simply made a keybinding for the right mouse button (bindsym button3 $exec ~/Git/xmenu/xmenu.sh). Now I can right-click i3bar and xmenu appears. Unfortunately, it does not work when clicked on the desktop. Anybody has any ideas on how to bindsym a mouse button to work on a workspace in i3?

[@kumarj6301]

hey DT, there is jgmenu can u compare

[@hanspetervollhorst1]

I am struggling about launching command line applications in DWM. For example termite --exec=vim launches vim, but after vim is initialised, DWM resizes the window but vim does not update and keeps using different window dimensions. Is there a trick for launching these applications?

[@hanspetervollhorst1]

alacritty did not help either. XTerm did the trick

[@MarkLeonTanner]

I love rofi and jgmenu... And synapse... I'm looking into this... I can right click on the desktop in dwm and launch jgmenu

[@charlesrodriguez3657]

Could you link the Moai head picture?

[@HEWfunkingKNEWit]

is it possible to grep someone elses scrot? Like remotely? I should probably grep my man scrot first right.

[@tralphstreet]

When you say "Ctrl+Alt+Return" you mean "Enter" for "Return" right? Why is it called like that? I had multiple times where I thought return meant backspace. Switching to Linux has been a really great experience but it's this kind of stuff that can be a bit confusing. I get how it's called the "super/meta/mod" key, instead of windows/start key, but I don't see a reason fro calling Enter Return.

[@Canadian789119]

So I can de bloat Openbox? and make Xfce usable ? :)

[@ichaa3tech]

What about desktop icons and folders ? I tried to do pcmanfm --desktop and xfdesktop but none of them worked as excpected

[@DistroTube]

Years ago, I played around with a program called idesk. It adds desktop icons to an X display.

[@ichaa3tech]

@@DistroTube noice . m gonna see what i can do

[@linuxrant]

I guess you could make a script that pipes all the .desktop files relevant info to the xmenu config to automatically add all installed apps. I am not so savvy at bash scripting yet, so I am gonna keep looking elsewhere for a proper menu for a tiler.

[@AbhishekBM]

4:05 Actually, it doesn't matter if we have expandtab set. Vim automatically uses tabs for Makefiles and spaces for Yaml files.

[@AbhishekBM]

@@mrdkaaa Nothing, but DT mentioned about turning off expandtab for Makefiles. I just wanted to clarify that vim does that for you.

[@waltermas736]

I use autokey for my menu

[@cstephan7]

Please make sure that subtitles are included in videos.

[@soulofhogwarts]

Just like this we need Xbar or xpanel and xsystray and xtaskbar and xdecoration and wohoo our Xde is ready.

[@leviticus8930]

Xdotool?

[@MarkLeonTanner]

I use arch with dwm... I have 4 launchers... Xmenud, rofi, jgmenu, and synapse...

[@thierrybo6304]

Looks like my openbox menu

[@little-wytch]

you mentioned using it in qtile... you've talked about qtile in a lot of videos... I'm still going thru your vid catalogue, but if you haven't done a vid on qtile yet, can you do one just about it? I like that it's python based but I can't ever get it to run, not in Debian, not in Kali, not in FreeBSD. Granted, I'm an uber-noob compared to most *nix users, but I'm learning and was hoping to compare qtile with i3 and awesome and see if i could recreate some of the few things I like about awesome in qtile... if i can make it work. This xmenu is a nice start on that, so thanks for showing it.

[@halyeon7560]

He's got a Qtile playlist if you haven't seen it already (videos aren't in order though I think). kzbin.info/www/bejne/p6HNpn6aobhse5Y

[@killertigergaming6762]

Hes made quite a few videos on qtile there all kinda old sadly

[@SimGunther]

There is a video by Accursed Farms called "The GUI should be better. A lot better" that covers the qualms of the GUI on a desktop well (with props to linux for customization). Definitely worth a watch to get ideas on how to make the GUI more intuitive.

[@jwc865]

I would like to use it but I’m not wasting Time configuring that, It should detect my programs by default just like Alber launcher

[@zehph]

You can get some inspiration from dmenu_run and see how it gets to list programs and otput it through a for loop on a sub section, you'd just have to manage some text streams to get the name of the program and maybe fix capitalisation. This is like an unfinished dmenu for GUI, but it does it well, you just have to write your customisations. We probably have dmenu_run because of dwm, but if dmenu was completely standalone, it would be the same schpile

[@natt8669]

There's also 9menu that functions similarly for Plan9 folk

[@kindred4779]

make videos about panels please

[@Myrkvi_]

Here's a very quick and dirty Awk script to convert the "Deskmenu" format available in menumaker into something that's compatible with xmenu. Categories with lots of applications will go off the screen and xmenu doesn't seem to be able to let you scroll that. function charrep(c, t) { charrep_text = ""; for (i = 0; i < t; i++) { charrep_text = charrep_text c; } return charrep_text; } function indent() { return charrep("\t", tabs); } BEGIN { FS="="; tabs = 0; } /^submenu/ { print indent() $2; tabs = tabs + 1; } /^endmenu/ { tabs = tabs - 1 } /^menuitem/ { FS=":"; OFS="\t"; gsub("menuitem=", "", $0); print indent() $1, $2; FS="="; } /^divider/ { print "" }

[@DistroTube]

I give you bonus points for using Awk! :D

[@champfisk5613]

Nice app but I think aliases are more productive for me

[@sasakanjuh7660]

Isn't that the reason why Rofi exists? :)

[@comp7on940]

classicmenu-indicator

[@zweitlander874]

:)

[@hanspetervollhorst1]

tabs > spaces

[@BarafuAlbino]

Just this "no spaces" thing alone is enough to call this xmenu broken.

[@Hyperboid]

What do you mean?

[@drishalballaney6590]

You are still using vim and not Emacs...

[@wackbyte]

waylan

[@megamaser]

Who actually uses menus like this? People who enjoy waiting? People who enjoy counting every pixel with their mouse? People who enjoy searching long lists of text manually with their eyes? Join the 21st century already, we have a wide variety of tools that make this work easier these days.

[@GothicKin]

Highlighting and copying the git link made me incredibly uncomfortable

[@alainleufroy]

Maybe you'll find clfswm funny.

[@TerenceKearns]

make install gets me this on Debian 12 xmenu.c:16:10: fatal error: X11/Xft/Xft.h: No such file or directory 16 | #include