dmenu-mac

dmenu inspired application launcher.

Who is it for

Anyone that needs a quick and intuitive keyboard-only application launcher that does not rely on spotlight indexing.

Why

If you are like me and have a shit-ton of files on your computer, and spotlight keeps your CPU running like crazy.

1. Disable spotlight completely and its global shortcut (recommended but not necessary)
2. Download and run dmenu-mac

How to use

1. Open the app, use cmd-Space to bring it to front.
2. Optionally, you can change the binding by clicking the ... on the right of the menu.
3. Type the application you want to open, hit enter to run the one selected.

Running from a shell

When opened as an app (Finder, Dock, login items), dmenu-mac stays in the background waiting for its hotkey. When started from a shell or a hotkey daemon like skhd, it exits after you pick an app or press Esc, so it can be bound to a key without piling up processes. Use --exit or --no-exit to force either behaviour.

Pipes

You can make dmenu-mac part of your scripting toolbox, use it to prompt the user for options:

echo "Yes\nNo" | dmenu-mac -p "Are you sure?"
Yes

Installation

dmenu-mac can be installed with brew running:

brew install dmenu-mac

Optionally, you can download it here.

NOTE: the releases are not signed yet, use it at your own risk. I'll take care of that as soon as we can assess the number of people interested in the project.

*macOS 13.5 or greater required.

Features

• Uses fuzzy search
• Configurable global hotkey
• Multi-display support
• Not dependant on spotlight indexing

Development

xcodebuild -skipPackagePluginValidation -skipMacroValidation \
  -project dmenu-mac.xcodeproj -scheme dmenu-mac -configuration Debug test
# single test: add -only-testing:dmenu-macTests/SearchServiceTests[/testName]

swiftlint --strict   # CI fails on warnings

-skipPackagePluginValidation is required because SwiftLint runs as an Xcode build plugin.

Pull requests

Any improvement/bugfix is welcome.

Authors

@onaips