Repository: davatorium/rofi
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README.md
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Please match the documentation and scripts to the version of rofi used
- next version
- 2.0.0
- 1.7.9
- 1.7.8
- 1.7.7
- 1.7.6
- 1.7.5
- 1.7.4
- 1.7.3
- 1.7.2
- 1.7.1
- 1.7.0
Also see the locally installed documentation (manpages).
<h1 align="center"> Rofi </h1>
<p align="center"><i>A window switcher, Application launcher and dmenu replacement</i>.</p>
<https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/84911063/139428874-fe182dd6-82c6-49b8-8da1-920ddda3d1ed.mp4>
Rofi started as a clone of simpleswitcher, written by Sean
Pringle - a popup window
switcher roughly based on
superswitcher. Simpleswitcher laid
the foundations, and therefore Sean Pringle deserves most of the credit for
this tool. Rofi (renamed, as it lost the simple property) has been
extended with extra features, like an application launcher and ssh-launcher,
and can act as a drop-in dmenu replacement, making it a very versatile tool.
Thanks to the great work of lbonn, who added
Wayland support in his fork and maintained it for years, Rofi
now officially supports Wayland (since 2025).
Rofi, like dmenu, will provide the user with a textual list of options
where one or more can be selected.
This can either be running an application, selecting a window, or options
provided by an external script.
What is rofi not?
Rofi is not:
- A UI toolkit.
- A library to be used in other applications.
- An application that can support every possible use-case. It tries to be
generic enough to be usable by everybody.
- Specific functionality can be added using scripts or plugins, many exists.
- Just a dmenu replacement. The dmenu functionality is a nice 'extra' to
rofi, not its main purpose.
Table of Contents
- Features
- Modes
- Manpages
- Installation
- Quickstart
- Usage
- Configuration
- Themes
- Screenshots
- Wiki
- Discussion places
Features
Its main features are:
- Fully configurable keyboard navigation
- Type to filter
- Tokenized: type any word in any order to filter
- Case insensitive (togglable) or SmartCase
- Support for fuzzy-, regex-, prefix-, and glob-matching
- UTF-8 enabled
- UTF-8-aware string collating
- International keyboard support (\e -> è)
- RTL language support
- Cairo drawing and Pango font rendering
- Built-in modes:
- Window switcher mode
- EWMH compatible WM
- Work arounds for i3,bspwm
- Wayland based WMs that follow the wlr family
- Application launcher
- Desktop file application launcher
- SSH launcher mode
- File browser
- Combi mode, allowing several modes to be merged into one list
- History-based ordering — last 25 choices are ordered on top based on use
(optional)
- Levenshtein distance or fzf like sorting of matches (optional)
- Drop-in dmenu replacement
- Many added improvements
- Easily extensible using scripts and plugins
- Advanced Theming
Modes
Rofi has several built-in modes implementing common use cases and can be
extended by scripts (either called from
Rofi or calling Rofi) or plugins.
Below is a list of the different modes:
- run: launch applications from $PATH, with option to launch in terminal.
- drun: launch applications based on desktop files. It tries to be
compliant to the XDG standard.
- window: Switch between windows on an EWMH compatible window manager.
- ssh: Connect to a remote host via ssh.
- filebrowser: A basic file-browser for opening files.
- keys: list internal keybindings.
- script: Write (limited) custom mode using simple scripts.
- combi: Combine multiple modes into one.
Rofi is known to work on Linux and BSD.
Wayland support
Build
Please follow the build instructions to build rofi.
Wayland support is enabled by default, along with X11/xcb.
rofi can also be built without X11/xcb or wayland, but atleast one backend
should be enabled:
meson build -Dxcb=disabled
meson build -Dwayland=disabled
Usage
Rofi should automatically select the xcb or wayland backend depending on
the environment it is run on.
To force the use of the xcb backend (if enabled during build), the -x11
option can be used:
rofi -x11 ...
Missing features in Wayland mode
Due to the different architecture and available APIs in Wayland mode, some original rofi features are difficult or impossible to replicate
- -normal-window flag. Though it is also considered as a toy/deprecated feature in Upstream rofi. Not impossible but would require some work.-monitor -n
- for fine-grained selection of monitor to display rofi onx-offset
- some window locations parameters work partially, and y-offset are only working from screen edges
- fake transparency
- window mode on KWin which implements different protocols than the wlr family
Wayland DPI
On wayland, the output is only known after the first surface is shown. This makes sizing
rofi windows in absolute size (mm) very difficult, a problem unique for rofi,
as the actual DPI is unknown before hand. This can be worked around by manually
passing the right DPI via configuration system. If the dpi config option is0
set to and only one monitor is connected rofi will use the DPI of the only
connected monitor or if you have multiple monitors and you specify a monitor
name, it will use the DPI of that monitor.
Manpage
For more up to date information, please see the manpages. The other sections
and links might have outdated information as they have relatively less
maintainance than the manpages. So, if you come across any issues please
consult manpages, discussion
and issue tracker before filing
new issue.
- Manpages:
- rofi
- rofi-theme
- rofi-debugging
- rofi-script
- rofi-theme-selector
- rofi-thumbnails
- rofi-keys
- rofi-dmenu
Installation
Please see the installation guide for instructions on how to
install Rofi.
Quickstart
Usage
This section just gives a brief overview of the various options. To get the
full set of options see the manpages section above
#### Running rofi
To launch rofi directly in a certain mode, specify a mode with rofi -show <mode>.run
To show the dialog:
rofi -show runOr get the options from a script:
~/my_script.sh | rofi -dmenuSpecify an ordered, comma-separated list of modes to enable. Enabled modes can
be changed at runtime. Default key is Ctrl+Tab. If no modes are specified,run
all configured modes will be enabled. To only show the and ssh
launcher:
rofi -modes "run,ssh" -show runThe modes to combine in combi mode.
For syntax to -combi-modes, see -modes.window
To get one merge view, of ,run, and ssh:
rofi -show combi -combi-modes "window,run,ssh" -modes combiConfiguration
Generate a default configuration file
mkdir -p ~/.config/rofi
rofi -dump-config > ~/.config/rofi/config.rasiThis creates a file called config.rasi in the ~/.config/rofi/ folder. Youconfig.rasi` is the file rofi looks to by default.
can modify this file to set configuration settings and modify themes.
Please see the configuration
guide for a summary of
configuration options. More detailed options are provided in the manpages.
Themes
Please see the themes
manpages
for a detailed description.
The latest bundled themes can be found
here.
Screenshots
Rezlooks:
Arthur:
Default theme:
Wiki
| ❗ The Wiki is currently unmaintained and might contain outdated data |
| --- |
Contents
- User scripts
- Examples
- dmenu Specs
- mode Specs
- F.A.Q..
- Script mode
- Creating an issue
- Creating a Pull request
Discussion places
The GitHub Discussions is the
preferred location for discussions.
- GitHub Discussions
- IRC (#rofi on irc.libera.chat)
Stargazers over time
