FAQ

This article is dedicated to frequently asked questions. Ctrl+f is your friend here.

• Does this work on Wayland?
  • It works on wlroots compositors or compositors that implement wlr-layer-shell. If you don't know what that is, know that Hyprland, Sway, dwl and more all support spmenu. KDE also seems to supports spmenu, despite not being wlroots based.
• Does this work on X11?
  • Yes. Works on all X11 window managers, or even no window manager if you prefer for some reason.
• Does this work on GNOME?
  • Yes.. sort of. spmenu works on GNOME but due to GNOME not implementing wlr-layer-shell the Wayland variant of this program cannot be used. This is a GNOME problem, and not something I can fix. A while ago I added a little check into spmenu. If it detects GNOME Wayland running it will fall back on X11 support which will run on GNOME Wayland due to XWayland being present. If you happen to be using the X11 variant of GNOME then it will also just work.
• Is this a dmenu build/fork?
  • It is a fork of dmenu, but it features almost none of the original dmenu code. This is not just a dmenu build with a bunch of patches applied, it is an entirely separate project with different ideas.
• Is spmenu compatible with dmenu?
  • spmenu should be compatible with dmenu. It should also be compatible with wmenu and dmenu-wayland. It may not be fully compatible with rofi/wofi, but should be relatively similar to tofi. It is also similar to xprompt.
• How can I port over my dmenu scripts?
  • Simply replace dmenu with spmenu. Or, if you prefer simply symlink /usr/bin/dmenu to /usr/bin/spmenu. If you patched dmenu there could potentially be some compatibility issues, but spmenu will ignore arguments it doesn't recognize. This means rofi scripts are also likely to work. (with warnings)
• Does spmenu follow the suckless philosophy?
  • No. There is no patching necessary, and the user is not expected to look at the source code/codebase. spmenu uses a configuration file.
• Is spmenu a run launcher?
  • Yes and no. spmenu at its core just takes standard input (or the contents of a file) and outputs the selected item(s). However it comes bundled with a Bash script called spmenu_run which handles $PATH, .desktop entries and even basic file management/navigation.
• Where do I file a bug report?
  • Bug reports can be filed here. Same goes for pull requests if you are able to fix the problem. Create an account on the site, it's easy. If you've worked with Gitea in the past, you're no doubt familiar with it. If you don't want to go this route though, you could submit a issue or pull request to the GitHub mirror instead.