Application Launchers

rofi – window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement

rofi is a window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement. Its main aim is to improve your workflow, allowing users to quickly switch between windows, start applications or log into a remote machine via ssh.

Rofi has several built-in modes implementing common use cases and can be extended by scripts (either called from Rofi or calling Rofi).

The run mode allows users to quickly search for and launch a program.

Run mode features:

  • Shift-Return to run the selected program in a terminal
  • favorites list, with frequently used programs sorted on top
  • custom entries, like aliases, added by executing a command

rofi focuses on being fast to use and have minimal distraction. It supports keyboard and mouse navigation, type to filter, tokenized search and more.

Other features include:

  • Fully configurable keyboard navigation.
  • Type to filter:
    • tokenized: type any word in any order to filter.
    • (togglable) case insensitive.
    • support for fuzzy-, regex-, 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.
    • application launcher.
    • desktop file application launcher.
    • SSH launcher mode.
    • 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 ordering of matches (optional).
  • drop-in dmenu replacement:
    • many added improvements.
  • easily extensible using scripts.
  • theming.

Website: github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi
Support: GitHub code repository
Developer: Qball Cow, Rasmus Steinke, Quentin Glidic and many contributions (Original author: Sean Pringle)
License: MIT/X11 License

rofi is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.


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Read our verdict in the software roundup.


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