qmenu

A minimal, themeable dmenu/rofi-style launcher for Wayland compositors that support wlr-layer-shell (Hyprland, Sway, river, …). It renders a centred, rounded floating bar near the top of the screen, lets you type to filter, and either prints your choice (dmenu mode) or launches an application — with icons — (drun mode). Colours, fonts, sizes, icons and behaviour are all driven by a TOML config file.

It is a small, dependency-light Rust program built on smithay-client-toolkit for the Wayland plumbing and cosmic-text for text shaping and rendering. Drawing is plain software blitting into a shared memory buffer — no GPU/EGL required.

Modes

• dmenu mode (default). Reads newline-separated items on stdin, shows them, and prints the selected line to stdout. If nothing matches, Enter echoes the raw query (like dmenu). Use it as a generic chooser:

  printf 'one\ntwo\nthree\n' | qmenu

• drun mode (--drun). Ignores stdin and instead discovers XDG .desktop application entries, shows their friendly Name (with the app icon), and prints the selected app's cleaned Exec line to stdout. Entries marked NoDisplay/Hidden and non-Application types are skipped, and desktop-file IDs are de-duplicated following the freedesktop precedence rules ($XDG_DATA_HOME shadows the system directories). Icons are resolved against the freedesktop icon theme dirs and rasterised from PNG or SVG. This is the equivalent of rofi -show drun.

  qmenu --drun

  Terminal=true entries are wrapped as $TERMINAL -e <exec>. The terminal is read from QMENU_TERMINAL, then TERMINAL, defaulting to xterm.

Keybindings

Key	Action
Type	Filter (substring, case-insensitive)
Up / Down, Ctrl-p / Ctrl-n	Move selection
PageUp / PageDown	Move a page
Enter	Confirm selection (or, in dmenu mode, the typed query)
Esc, Ctrl-c	Cancel (exit non-zero, like dmenu)
Backspace, Ctrl-u, Ctrl-w	Edit the query

Building

Cargo

Native libraries are needed at build and run time: wayland, libxkbcommon, fontconfig, freetype (and pkg-config to find them).

cargo build --release
./target/release/qmenu --drun

Some of those libraries are dlopened at runtime; if your distro doesn't place them on the default loader path you may need LD_LIBRARY_PATH set (the Nix build below wraps the binary to handle this automatically).

Nix

# Flake:
nix build            # -> ./result/bin/qmenu
nix run . -- --drun

# Or without flakes:
nix-build            # -> ./result/bin/qmenu
nix develop          # or: nix-shell, for a dev environment

The Nix package wraps the binary with the required LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so the result runs anywhere without further setup.

Using it as an app launcher

contrib/qmenu-run is an example launcher script with toggle behaviour: bind it to a key, and pressing that key again while qmenu is open closes it (rather than opening a second instance). It tracks the running instance via a pidfile in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.

Example Hyprland bind:

bind = SUPER, Space, exec, qmenu-run

Example Sway bind:

bindsym $mod+space exec qmenu-run

Configuration

qmenu reads a TOML config file; every key is optional and falls back to a built-in default. The lookup order (first that exists wins) is:

1. --config <path>
2. $QMENU_CONFIG
3. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/qmenu/config.toml (i.e. ~/.config/qmenu/config.toml)
4. $QMENU_DEFAULT_CONFIG — a packaged fallback (see Nix below)

Copy config.example.toml to ~/.config/qmenu/config.toml and edit. It documents the full schema: the colour palette, geometry (width_fraction, corner_radius, border_width, paddings, font_size, font_family, …), [icons] (toggle/size/theme), and [behavior] (show_all_when_empty, placeholder, terminal). Colours accept #rgb, #rrggbb, or #aarrggbb.

By default nothing is shown until you start typing; set behavior.show_all_when_empty = true for the classic always-listed behaviour.

Theming via the flake

The Nix package takes an optional settings attrset (the config schema as Nix), serialised to TOML and baked in as QMENU_DEFAULT_CONFIG — a shipped default theme that a user's own ~/.config/qmenu/config.toml still overrides:

inputs.qmenu.packages.${system}.default.override {
  settings = {
    colors.background = "#0b0b10";
    colors.border = "#ff4fa3";
    layout.font_family = "Inter";
  };
};

Limitations

• Substring filtering only (no fuzzy ranking).
• No HiDPI / fractional-scale handling (text uses logical pixels).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.