Menu Suite

This is a collection of shell scripts that interface with either dmenu or fzf. There's also an experimental perl rewrite in the perl directory.

Since everyone's *nix setups are different, these scripts fit my personal use case and may not fit yours.

Included Scripts

Additional Perl Scripts

Screenshot(s)

Possible Usage

All scripts take a single optional argument to decide which backend to use. If this argument is excluded, dmenu is used by default. Backends supported: fzf, dmenu, and rofi.

Run mpcmenu (interface for mpd client) with dmenu:

~/bin/menu/scripts/mpcmenu dmenu

Run mpcmenu in a new terminal emulator (urxvt or termite) window with fzf:

urxvt -name "fzf-menu" -geometry 80x24 -e $HOME/bin/menu/scripts/mpcmenu fzf
termite --class "fzf-menu" --geometry 640x480 -e "$HOME/bin/menu/scripts/mpcmenu fzf"

We set an interface name for our urxvt window so we can allow a window manager to specifically manage these menus. For example, bspwm allows us to set rules for window interfaces:

bspc rule -a fzf-menu floating=on,center=on,monitor=LVDS1,follow=on

With this, my fzf-enabled menus will be floating and centered on my laptop monitor. It will also focus itself if I run it from any other monitor.

A similar rule for i3 would be:

for_window [class="^fzf-menu$"] floating enable, move output LVDS1

Note:

When spawning a new terminal to run the runmenu script (with fzf), sometimes the new process will not properly detach itself from its parent shell. So when the spawned terminal exits, the process started by runmenu will also exit.

Xresources

If you choose to use dmenu, lib/menu_helpers has a USE_DMENURC flag if you choose to not use the Xresources database (or don't have a version of dmenu that supports it). You should set that flag to 1 and modify lib/dmenurc in that case.

If you choose to go the Xresources route, you can specify options in your .Xresources file. For example, dmenu2 reads these:

dmenu.font:          DroidSansFallback:bold:size=8
dmenu.foreground:    #C7CCD1
dmenu.background:    #1C2023
dmenu.selbackground: #95AEC7
dmenu.selforeground: #1C2023

Remember to run xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources to load these new values!

Lockfiles

A useful concept relevant to these scripts are semaphores (in particular, lockfiles). What lockfiles will allow use to do is to ensure that there is only one running menu at a time. There are many tools to do this: lockfile, flock, and some homegrown (albeit flawed) solutions. lockwrap is an extremely simple script that will pass your command to flock under a predefined lock name:

Inside lockwrap:

#!/bin/sh
flock -n /tmp/menusuite.lock -c $@

Usage:

$ ./lockwrap ./mpcmenu
$ ./lockwrap alsamixer

If these commands are immediately run one after another, alsamixer will not be opened as mpcmenu would be using the lockfile.

TODO

Shell Scripts

• Sourcing menu_helpers.sh introduces redundancy into every menu script. Maybe a way to solve this is to have another wrapper script to run each menu.

• Merge menu_helpers.sh into menuwrap.sh. The problem I have with this though is that each menu script can no longer be run without delegation from menuwrap.sh.