bemenu VS no_color

I really like using something like fuzzy search for menus like these. https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu is pretty cool in that it works both in a terminal, X11 and on Wayland, so if you want to do something graphical later you can easily migrate. There's also fzf and skim, which work similarly but are only for the terminal.

I know that dmenu won't work on wayland, hence I installed bemenu as a drop-in replacement. Now I want to configure keybindings for my scripts using the default settings, but they don't seem to work. Running my scripts from the terminal work, but not when running them via keybinding.

bemenu (i. e. bemenu-run) is a simple launcher that has command line interface (set with BEMENU_BACKEND environment variable), also fzf can be useful in this regard but it will most likely require writing additional scripts to work as a launcher.

I've already highlighted how using environment variables to change themes is a horrible user experience. The bemenu program suffers from the same flaw. Environment Variables should never be used in any way for values that might change inside a running session.

bemenu

Environment variables are fine when used for things that usually don't change once they're set. For example, XDG_CONFIG_HOME or GOPATH. They are, however, absolutely awful when used to configure values that will probably change inside a session. A good example is BEMENU_OPTS from the bemenu program, which is used to change colors, font etc. Should I relogin into my session just to make a program use dark mode colors?

https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu#environment-variables

In such cases, environment variables lose their intended purpose and they need to be stuffed into wrapper scripts or overridden on the command line before executing a command, which is extremely annoying.

Bemenu - "Dynamic menu library and client program inspired by dmenu"

Instead of rofi, bemenu[2] is nice too.

[1] https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst/issues/264

[2] https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu

tessen can use either bemenu, the wayland fork of rofi, or wofi to show password store data. It relies on wtype for autotyping instead of using ydotool because ydotool needs root privileges.

This sounds like a really good pattern, and something that deserves to become a modern standard (like https://no-color.org/).

I feel like this should be made opt in somehow. If you are a noninteractive process and stdin is a tty then you probably shouldn't be swallowing input. I frequently blind-type the next command while a long running command is active, because well behaved noninteractive programs don't swallow input from stdin.

Does this support the environment variable for NO_COLOR too? https://no-color.org/

Some of us prefer tools which work best without them.

Allow me to repeat my plea for CLI developers to take a little time to read https://no-color.org and ensure their programs honor things like NO_COLOR, npm config set color false, TERM=dumb, INSIDE_EMACS etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35017940

Change: [#1908] Detects if terminal is VT100 capable and uses colors for the output, can be disabled using NO_COLOR.

Why not let termenv do the hard part of making this portable across terminals? It also supports lesser-known conventions like NO_COLOR.