A window switcher, Application launcher and dmenu replacement

Rofi started as a clone of simpleswitcher, written by Sean Pringle a popup window switcher roughly based on superswitcher. Simpleswitcher laid the foundations, and therefor 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, ssh-launcher and can act as a drop-in dmenu replacement, making it a very versatile tool.

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.

Its main features are:

• 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

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

Below the different modes are listed:

Window Switcher

The window switcher shows the following informations in columns (can be customized):

1. Desktop name
2. Window class
3. Window title

Window mode features:

• closing applications with Shift-Delete
• custom command with Shift-Return

Application launcher

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

Desktop File Application launcher

The desktop run mode allows users to quickly search and launch an application from the freedesktop.org Desktop Entries. These are used by most Desktop Environments to populate launchers and menus. Drun mode features:

• favorites list, with frequently used programs sorted on top
• auto starting terminal applications in a terminal

SSH launcher

Quickly ssh into remote machines

• parses ~/.ssh/config to find hosts

Script mode

Loads external scripts to add modes to Rofi, for example a file-browser.

rofi  -show fb -modi fb:../Examples/rofi-file-browser.sh

COMBI mode

Combine multiple modes in one view. This is especially useful when merging the window and run mode into one view. Allowing to quickly switch to an application, either by switching to it when it is already running or starting it.

Example to combine Desktop run and the window switcher:

rofi -combi-modi window,drun -show combi -modi combi

dmenu replacement

Drop in dmenu replacement. (Screenshot shows rofi used by teiler ).

Rofi features several improvements over dmenu to improve usability. There is the option to add an extra message bar (-mesg), pre-entering of text (-filter), or selecting entries based on a pattern (-select). Also highlighting (-u and -a) options and modi to force user to select one provided option (-only-match). In addition to this, rofi's dmenu mode can select multiple lines and write them to stdout.

Usage

If used with -show [mode], rofi will immediately open in the specified [mode]

If used with -dmenu, rofi will use data from STDIN to let the user select an option.

For example, to show a run dialog:

rofi -show run

To show a ssh dialog:

rofi -show ssh

dmenu

If rofi is passed the -dmenu option, or run as dmenu (ie, /usr/bin/dmenu is symlinked to /usr/bin/rofi), it will use the data passed from STDIN.

~/scripts/my_script.sh | rofi -dmenu
echo -e "Option #1\nOption #2\nOption #3" | rofi -dmenu

In both cases, rofi will output the user's selection to STDOUT.

Switching Between Modi

Type Shift-/Left/Right to switch between active modi.

Key bindings

Key	Action
Ctrl-v, Insert	Paste from clipboard
Ctrl-Shift-v, Shift-Insert	Paste primary selection
Ctrl-w	Clear the line
Ctrl-u	Delete till the start of line
Ctrl-a	Move to beginning of line
Ctrl-e	Move to end of line
Ctrl-f, Right	Move forward one character
Alt-f, Ctrl-Right	Move forward one word
Ctrl-b, Left	Move back one character
Alt-b, Ctrl-Left	Move back one word
Ctrl-d, Delete	Delete character
Ctrl-Alt-d	Delete word
Ctrl-h, Backspace, Shift-Backspace	Backspace (delete previous character)
Ctrl-Alt-h	Delete previous word
Ctrl-j,Ctrl-m,Enter	Accept entry
Ctrl-n,Down	Select next entry
Ctrl-p,Up	Select previous entry
Page Up	Go to the previous page
Page Down	Go to the next page
Ctrl-Page Up	Go to the previous column
Ctrl-Page Down	Go to the next column
Ctrl-Enter	Use entered text as a command (in ssh/run modi)
Shift-Enter	Launch the application in a terminal (in run mode)
Shift-Enter	Return the selected entry and move to the next item while keeping Rofi open. (in dmenu)
Shift-Right	Switch to the next modi. The list can be customized with the -modi option.
Shift-Left	Switch to the previous modi. The list can be customized with the -modi option.
Ctrl-Tab	Switch to the next modi. The list can be customized with the -modi option.
Ctrl-Shift-Tab	Switch to the previous modi. The list can be customized with the -modi option.
Ctrl-space	Set selected item as input text.
Shift-Del	Delete entry from history.
grave	Toggle case sensitivity.
Alt-grave	Toggle levenshtein sort.
Alt-Shift-S	Take a screenshot and store it in the Pictures directory.

For the full list of key bindings, see: rofi -show keys or rofi -help.

Configuration

There are currently three methods of setting configuration options:

• Local configuration. Normally, depending on XDG, in ~/.config/rofi/config. This uses the Xresources format.
• Xresources: A method of storing key values in the Xserver. See here for more information.
• Command line options: Arguments are passed to Rofi.

A distribution can ship defaults in /etc/rofi.conf.

The Xresources options and the command line options are aliased. To define option X set:

rofi.X: value

In the Xresources file. To set/override this from command line pass the same key prefixed with '-':

rofi -X value

To get a list of available options formatted as Xresources entries, run:

rofi -dump-Xresources

or in a more readable format:

rofi -help

The configuration system supports the following types:

• string
• integer (signed and unsigned)
• char
• Boolean

The Boolean option has a non-default command line syntax, to enable option X you do:

rofi -X

to disable it:

rofi -no-X

Manpage

For more detailed information, please see the manpage, the wiki, or the forum.

Installation

Please see the installation guide for instructions on how to install Rofi.

What is rofi not?

Rofi is not:

• A preview application. In other words, it will not show a (small) preview of images, movies or other files.
• 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.
• Just a dmenu replacement. The dmenu functionality is a nice 'extra' to rofi, not its main purpose.