I had to pass -DCURSES_LIBRARY=/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncursesw.so.5 to cmake when building bemenu on Ubuntu 16.04 (64-bit).

Otherwise, I get this error:

bemenu-run
/usr/lib/bemenu/bemenu-renderer-curses.so: undefined symbol: get_wch

I have issues with the bemenu font rendering when HiDPI scaling (factor 2) is used on wayland. I'm using sway (version 1.0-beta.2-270-g1a1133dc) and bemenu (r262.799d8b9-1 according to the package version I installed from git) on Archlinux.
I also tried to set the backend specifically to wayland using the BEMENU_BACKEND env variable and using different ttf fonts and sizes. But with no success. The font appears very blurry in comparison to other applications.

Hello, not sure if I'm just missing an option somewhere but would it be possible to add an 'open in terminal' option for command line applications?

In other launchers, usually you can hold [shift] while pressing [enter] and it will launch the selected application in a terminal window.

Currently I have to run alacritty -e ranger to launch a ranger window. Issuing ranger alone will not launch it.

bemenu works on wlroots 0.6 and doesn't do anything on wlroots 0.8.1. wlroots 0.7 and 0.8 are untested.

When run from the console the binary launches but does nothing. e.g. echo "foo" | bemenu on x11 will show something like

bemenu             foo

at the top of your screen. However on wlroots 0.8.1 nothing happens.

Since there isn't any output I'm not sure how helpful this bug report is, but at least you know about it now. Can I compile with debug messages enabled or something?

bemenu worked fine until yesterday, but suddenly doesn't do anything anymore.

$ ls | bemenu

$

I cannot find any debug option in the bemenu manpages, so I have no idea what's happening and how to fix the issue.

$ bemenu --version                                           │
bemenu v0.3.0 
$ pacman -Qs bemenu
local/bemenu 0.3.0-1
    Dynamic menu library and client program inspired by dmenu
    with support for wayland compositors

Running arch linux and sway 1:1.2-5 (wayland).

Any idea why this is happening?

versions:

• OS: Arch linux
• sway 1:1.2-5
• bemenu-git r303.98f7c80-1

Expected behavior: Triggering bemenu while another app is fullscreen should display bemenu on top of the full-screen application

Current behavior: bemenu is shown behind the fullscreen application.

In web dev, it would be a matter of bumping the css z-index property. In wayland/X11, no idea ^^

Note: the manpage mentionned an -n parameter (--no-overlap) for wayland, but using it still doesn't show bemenu while another app is fullscreen

An empty PATH segment ("::") is causing bemenu-run to go into a deadloop.

To reproduce

PATH="$PATH::" ./client/bemenu-run

Expected Behaviour

bemenu-run should ignore empty path segments

It's possible to paste in the curses backend thanks to the terminal emulator via either shift-insert or its pasting mechanism but this functionality is not yet available in X11 or Wayland mode.

For comparison, dmenu uses C-y for pasting from X11's primary selection buffer.

Since we don't do any caching in bemenu-run (by choice), on slow disks and on first startup loading binaries from $PATH may be slow. If we do this on background and fill the list chunk by chunk it might be nicer. Chck's thread pool is useful here.

Hi and thanks a lot for bemenu!

I was wondering if there's a way to specify an alpha value in bemenu's colors.

For example: bemenu --nb '#09abac5a' where the last two characters would make the background transparent.

In dmenu -l, the items have a hanging indent that is as wide as the prompt or 'title':

In bemenu -l, they don't, and everything just looks slighly weird when it's glued to the screen edge:

(The --prefix option doesn't quite do the job; it just indents the text and not the background fill, and getting it to be exactly the right width can get annoying.)

Dmenu provides M-h and M-l as alternative keys to the arrows; what do you think about adding M-hjkl where M-j is down and so on?

If you use a high number via -l then bemenu will render entires beyond the edge of the screen.

It would be nice if it could somehow detect the bottom and page instead. This might be related to your proposal for using -l 0 which would do the same thing and is generally what using a high number is intending to achieve.

wl_registry@2: error 0: invalid version for global wl_seat (5): have 4, wanted 5

This line ???
wayland->seat = wl_registry_bind(registry, id, &wl_seat_interface, XDG_SHELL_VERSION_CURRENT);
In weston client version is always 1 o 4

Allows us to work as panel in Weston and Sway[1] for example.

1: swaywm/sway#374

Currently key repetition isn't used when scrolling through the items using any of the navigation keys such as Up or Down.

There are two discrepancies between bemenu and dmenu. When selecting multiple entries with C-RET,

1. in dmenu, you print the selection with S-RET, whereas in bemenu S-RET is the same as ESC. Additionally, C-[ doesn't behave as ESC.
2. in bemenu, hitting RET will print both the selected entries and and the highlighted entry whether or not the highlighted entry was selected. dmenu will only launch selected entries with S-RET, and only the highlighted entry with RET whether or not there are selected entries.

The former amounts to trivial changes, but consistency would be nice. The latter I find to be unexpected, being a dmenu user. I like that in dmenu, even if I were to select a bunch of entries, I still have the choice to launch only the one highlighted entry, or all the selected ones.

Similar to rofi, it would be nice if launching something, such as firefox, from bemenu meant that on next launch it would be above commands you've never ran, and that the most frequently-ran thing was at the top. This is really handy if you've ran a long specific command that you'll want to run again later. Also just keeping a history in general so you can filter to old commands would be nice.

Immediately after launching sway, if bemenu is launched using a hotkey, it will be hidden behind waybar. It will only appear once another window is opened or if the desktop is clicked.

Note, I have waybar and bemenu attached to the bottom of the screen.

This behavior seems to only occur after first boot. Exiting the sway session and starting it again does not result in this behavior. Similarly, logging out and logging in again does not result in this behavior.

Hello there. I got a problem from 24h now. The bemenu seems to use a bad font. I don't have very much knowledge on this kind of things.

Here's a screenshot

I'm on voidlinux, up to date. I don't think I installed something recently. Maybe this is an update issue from another package. Dunno

The -w causes M-j and M-k to correctly wrap but this don't seem to function when using M-d and M-u.

Once the bottom of the list is reached with M-d the next usage won't wrap to the beginning.

Some applications, such as the ones provided trough flatpak, typically only come with .desktop files as a way to be launched.

I am not entirely sure how to handle this (if you look for an app and there are two versions: one with a desktop file and one without, what should you display?), but displaying them at the end would be a start.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html

$XDG_DATA_DIRS is the $PATH equivalent. dex can be used to launch .desktop files.

I built this on Fedora 30, the build goes without problem, but when I run bemenu I get the error:

error while loading shared libraries: libbemenu.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Any advice is appreciated.

It looks like the wayland backend sets the classname, but I don't think the X backend sets any window properties. I think it would be nice to have at least the classname set mainly because I'd like to be able to have bemenu excluded for shadows with compton.

Build works fine but when trying to launch bemenu, it errors out for me with "undefined symbol" from pango for the x11 backend and wl_surface_interface for the wayland backend.

I'm using gentoo linux.

If I roll back to before #52, it launches and works as expected after building

I use bemenu (bemenu-git from AUR) with sway using the wayland backend and open it using mod+d. When trying to launch for example "playonlinux" the sequence is as follows:

Key Pressed - Displayed Value - Displayed list
p - (NULL) - (everything)
pl - p - p11-kt, p11tool....
pla - pl - pl2pm, play, playonlinux
play - pla - play, playonlinux
playo - play - play, playonlinux

Now when I hit enter "playonlinux" is run although "play" is marked as the active entry. So it seems only the display lags behind by one while intenally everything is correct.

Instead of tab completing the first entire match it would complete only the
matching portion; for example:

The user opens bemenu and types 'bemenu' before pressing tab.
+------------------+----------------------------------+
| bemenu-<tab>     | bemenu-run bemenu-pdf bemenu-mpc |
+------------------+----------------------------------+

Currently what would happen is the first match will complete in full, e.g.
+------------------+----------------------------------+
| bemenu-run       | bemenu-run                       |
+------------------+----------------------------------+

Instead, what I am proprosing is that when <tab> is pressed it will match the
first unique prefix:
+------------------+----------------------------------+
| bemenu-          | bemenu-run bemenu-pdf bemenu-mpc |
+------------------+----------------------------------+

With this method of completion, it is still possible to press <Return> to
select the first match, but it would make typing out the other choices much
easier.

For example, if it completed to bemenu-run I would then have to backspace
run before I can type mpc.

With the new completion mechanism I can type bemen, press <Tab>, which
results in bemenu- which has prepared the input nicely for the next thing I'd
like to type, e.g. m or p which would then complete to bemenu-mpc or
bemenu-pdf respective on a subsequent <Tab>.

I have tried running bemenu on Wayfire (a wlroots based compositor which supports layer-shell). However the bemenu-run didn't do anything visible. After a bit of debugging, I think I found the reason: the wayland backend waits for a wayland event before drawing the first frame. In some compositors though no such event will happen before the surface is mapped. Thus I think something along the lines should be implemented:

diff --git a/lib/renderers/wayland/wayland.c b/lib/renderers/wayland/wayland.c
index dd97009..8c18b62 100644
--- a/lib/renderers/wayland/wayland.c
+++ b/lib/renderers/wayland/wayland.c
@@ -13,6 +13,7 @@
 #include <sys/timerfd.h>
 
 static int efd;
+static int firstLoop = 1;
 
 static void
 render(const struct bm_menu *menu)
@@ -26,6 +27,16 @@ render(const struct bm_menu *menu)
     }
 
     struct epoll_event ep[16];
+    if (firstLoop)
+    {
+        struct window *window;
+        wl_list_for_each(window, &wayland->windows, link) {
+            bm_wl_window_render(window, wayland->display, menu);
+        }
+        firstLoop = 0;
+        return;
+    }
+
     uint32_t num = epoll_wait(efd, ep, 16, -1);
     for (uint32_t i = 0; i < num; ++i) {
         if (ep[i].data.ptr == &wayland->fds.display) {

This is of course just a hack, I am not familiar with the codebase enough to write a proper solution.

Please could you tag bemenu for release so that it may be packaged?

https://github.com/cloudef/bemenu/releases

Add configuration file and move colors to there from the command line. Maybe some other options too that make sense. Add command line option for choosing different configuration file than default.

I am using Sway and I have tried the latest Github version and the release of bemenu.

Some comments mention that this has worked before, so I was looking for the commit that broke it, but I couldn't find a good commit to begin with.

Thanks as always for your work on this, Cloudef!

The signature file for 0.2.0 seems to be done with key 0x0CBD2CD395613887, whereas previously it was 0xF769BB961AF6D26A. Before I build this update for Arch, can you confirm your new key with your old one (and send it to keyservers) and/or link to some canonical spot on your own site where it can be found?

This is mostly for tracking.

It would be pretty cool to have an option that turns bemenu into something suitable for entering credentials, be it by displaying nothing (like, sudo) or by displaying asterisks (like, browsers) or other glyphs (like, Emacs).

Currently a workaround would be to set the foreground color to the same value as the background color, but that's a pretty hacky way of doing it.

There is no manual page for bemenu. Ideally, a manual page should be included for every executable and configuration files so that the user can get the information needed to use or configure the application quickly.

Are there any plans to allow for the bar to be less wide (to avoid covering the clock, for example), and/or to move the whole bar to the middle of the screen? A bit like rofi or an i3 scratchpad window. There's a patch[1] that add these things to dmenu.
[1] https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/patches/xyw/

Curses is kind of unnecessary dependency for something this simple.

Memview is another TUI program that doesn't use curses:
https://github.com/Cloudef/memutils/blob/master/src/memview.c

Possible to remove lots of code and have more reliable codebase.

Not sure if I should raise this issue here or with sway.
When I try to launch a program via bemenu in an empty workspace sway (git) crashes. If there is another window already opened it works fine. Sway exits back to console with a segfault. I tried enabling sway debug but could not find any error.
It used to work fine about a week or two ago (I can try to find the exact commit which started this).
I am using the wayland backend.

bemenu is show behind waybar:

I'm using the default configuration of waybar.

Let me know if you need anything else.

There is a work in progress branch for this. However needs some work still.

On my side, when running bemenu on Sway, no menu is shown, and the terminal from which I ran it keeps the focus.
I've long thought it was something I misconfigured with respect to Wayland backend, but I recently noticed that forcing Sway to refresh display (using swaymsg reload, or using Ctrl+Alt+Fn to switch back-and-forth between TTY and Sway), while bemenuis running, gets the menu to be correctly shown.
I don't know whether the issue is on Sway or bemenu side, but I am opening this issue to collect your opinion on what could possibly be happening that causes this behaviour, and if there's any way I can get useful debug logs to push the investigation further.

I use images in my patched dmenu quite a lot.

--height <height> Sets the height of the bar. Default height (0) will match the font size.

Reason for this would be matching the height of sway-bar, for us OCD people out there. :)

Opening bemenu-run or any tool which calls bemenu in a wayland compositor (loliwm) doesn't expand to fill the full width of the focused monitor.

Is this expected behaviour?

-m (--monitor) also does not work on Wayland

Might be useful to put a screenshot of bemenu in README.md to show users what the program looks like.

Hello, I am running bemenu through the default pacman package, and I have found that there is no man pages related to the project, and some information on how the program can be installed from source.

I have tried running:

cmake .
make
sudo make install

Which results in the error:

bash: /usr/bin/bemenu-run: no such file or directory

Any information on how I can get started with this would be awesome. Thank you for your time.

I'm trying to build and run bemenu from source on Wayland. Building with cmake -DBEMENU_WAYLAND_RENDERER=ON .. works fine, but running it with dmenu_path | client/bemenu just has it exit (echo $? == 1) with no output. I tried using gdb and found that bm_init() fails at lib/library.c:137. Using 0.1.0 straight from the Arch repositories works fine.

If I were more fluent in C, I'd try to debug further, but this is the extent of my abilities.

We can share the pango and cairo code.