reMenu: A rust-enabled reconfigurable menu

reMenu is (or better: shall on day be) a reconfigurabe app launcher. When invoked, it collects available applications and presents the user with a simple menu that allow filtering and browsing through the available applications. The selected application can than be executed.

Current status

This is a very early version. It does not do anything, other more mature menus do not provide. It works on my machines as a daily driver. But it should not be considered usable right now. It is best described as a personal playground.

This is for learning right now.

Q&A

These are some questions I asked myself, while working on the project.

Does the world need yet another alternative to dmenu?

Maybe, maybe not. I want something a little bit different. And it is a good side project. It does not take much to have something basic, complexity is not to high and small increments are possible. Plus, it is fun.

Can I use it?

You can try. But why should you? At the moment, reMenu does not offer any features, that more mature alternatives do not offer. This will change in the future. But as of now, reMenu is in an early pre-alpha phase.

I tried it and it renders my native language wrong.

Not really a question, but it renders my native language wrong as well. As of now, only English works. I can live with that. This will change the future but it is no priority. I assume, most users of tiling window managers speak English as a first language or (like me) use English for interacting with tech. This leaves a small sub-group of an already small group of people out. In the presence of mature alternatives, this is okay.

What about Wayland support?

Wayland support is planned. As of now, my personal devices are too old for Wayland support. Therefore, I stay on i3wm for the moment. When I can switch to Sway, Wayland support will be added. Alternatively, I am thinking about a wgpu backend.

Limitations

• Nested folders are not supported when loading desktop entries. Normally, desktop entries are stored directly in the searched folders. I know only one case involving screensavers where this is not the case. Introducing nested folders for this use case only, does not make sense. Note that this might change, if more cases of nested folders are found in the wild.

Open issues

• scroll through results
• check for vertical fonts
• Add missing keys: F1-F12, delete, tab, pos1, end, pgn_up, pgn_down
• Correct desktop entries parser
• async loading of entries (allows typing while loading)
• check use of X DBE (double buffer extension)
• dpi setting
• casts and shortcuts in font rendering

References

Desktop entries

• https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_entries
• https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/.desktop-Dateien/
• https://www.baeldung.com/linux/desktop-entry-files
• https://github.com/pop-os/freedesktop-desktop-entry
• https://github.com/FivEawE/desktopentries/blob/master/src/entry.rs
• https://github.com/takluyver/deskent
• https://github.com/enkore/j4-dmenu-desktop