bemenu VS xdg-desktop-portal

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.

>Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703

>remapping keys

>Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev)

Up to the compositor.

>Global shortcuts

Also up to the compositor. Was added to xdp in https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data... so it's up to the compositor's xdp impl to provide it. It was created by a KDE dev so I assume KDE implements it at least.

>tunnelling over ssh

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

> - O proper screen recording support

Works just fine. I use OBS.

> - broken screen sharing

Never had any trouble with it.

> - No proper global keyboard shortcut

> - No push to talk support

On its way: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/711 / https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.free...

> - Several problems with multiple screens

Haven't had any more than on X11, but then again I do use Nvidia hardware on Linux.

It might help, but at this point Linux containers can't really stabilize the whole environment, especially for games. Particular pain points include accelerated graphics (which theoretically can have a stable kernel interface, but in practice is so complex and performance-sensitive that it's not stable enough to be a "reference platform", so to speak) and modern game controllers (which present a whole mess of concerns typically "addressed" in Flatpak by granting the device=all permission and hoping for the best [1]).

I also know a guy who ran into issues with a kernel update breaking a custom allocator, although I don't know the fine details. That wasn't for a game, but games also use custom allocators for various reasons.

[1] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/536

I don't use Wayland, but it seems xdg-desktop-portal since 1.16.0 has a 'Global Shortcuts portal'. Perhaps check it out.

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal

It's being discussed: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/611

The first bug report was filed in early 2022 but unfortunately no progress yet on the matter, even after numerous similar reports ever since.

Yeah been having the same issue since I changed to using the unstable branch, supposedly noticed and fixed upstream for a few variants of the problem (different people with different configurations of DE and xdg-* deps installed report the same issue due to timeouts of the other portals)