spmenu is a simple X11 and Wayland menu application which takes standard input, parses it, lets the user choose an option and sends the selected option to standard output.
In addition to this, it also serves as a run launcher and desktop
launcher through the included shell script spmenu_run
,
which handles both $PATH listing, .desktop entries, and file
listing.
While spmenu is based on dmenu, and is also fully compatible with dmenu, spmenu introduces many new features which can be useful in shell scripting, and notably Wayland support. There are way too many to list, but spmenu has a wiki which goes through features in more detail.
spmenu also serves as a proper dmenu replacement for Wayland users, and can be themed to look identical to dmenu.
If you are on Arch GNU/Linux, you can add my
repository which includes spmenu
as well as other
useful packages. Then simply pacman -S spmenu
.
Or if you are on Gentoo GNU/Linux, you can add my overlay
which includes x11-misc/spmenu
as well as other useful
packages. Then simply emerge spmenu
.
If you still need/want to manually compile, follow along with manual compilation.
Here we’re manually compiling spmenu. This is likely what you’ll want to do if you’re using any distribution but Arch or Gentoo.
Git is required to clone the repository, but you can also use releases. Those can be unpacked using
tar -xpvf /path/to/spmenu-version.tar.gz
.
To install Git:
Gentoo: emerge dev-vcs/git
Arch: pacman -S git
Debian: apt-get install git
You will also need the dependencies for spmenu. You’ll have to find those packages in your distribution repositories.
To clone the repository using Git:
git clone https://git.speedie.site/speedie/spmenu
cd spmenu/
Configure the build by running these commands:
mkdir -p build/ # Create a build/ directory, Meson will use this as the working directory
meson setup build # This will check to make sure all dependencies are found. If you're recompiling you may want to pass --reconfigure as an argument
This is where you can enable/disable certain features, as well as set compiler options.
Now, to build it run ninja -C build
. If all went well
you should have a binary in the build/
directory.
Finally, to install it all, run:
meson install -C build --prefix /usr # /usr may be overriden to /usr/local or anything else
To generate documentation, which may be necessary if you’re pushing
new changes to your Git repository, run
scripts/make/generate-docs.sh
in the current
directory.
To generate a tarball, run scripts/make/generate-pkg.sh
in the current directory. If you want to generate a
pacman package, run scripts/make/generate-pacman-pkg.sh
instead.
Note that Wayland support is still experimental, and some features do not currently work under Wayland. Some will never work under Wayland due to limitations. These are:
--x-position
and --y-position
arguments
-w
and window manager managed
-wm
--monitor
argument
--vertical-padding
and
--horizontal-padding
arguments
There’s a page dedicated to user scripts over on the wiki. Feel free to contribute and try scripts on there.
See the included spmenu(1) and spmenu_run(1) man pages.
spmenu is licensed under the MIT license. See the included LICENSE file for more information!
spmenu has a wiki for more extensive documentation. Contributions to the wiki are appreciated, and can be done through the Git repository.