rofi VS bemenu

Compare rofi vs bemenu and see what are their differences.

rofi

Rofi: A window switcher, run dialog and dmenu replacement - fork with wayland support (by lbonn)

bemenu

Dynamic menu library and client program inspired by dmenu (by Cloudef)
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rofi bemenu
22 12
783 1,114
- -
8.8 8.2
2 days ago 23 days ago
C C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rofi

Posts with mentions or reviews of rofi. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-29.
  • Calculator for sway
    5 projects | /r/swaywm | 29 Jun 2023
    https://github.com/svenstaro/rofi-calc together with https://github.com/lbonn/rofi (both packaged for openSUSE and perhaps other Linux distros).
  • Rofi dry run
    2 projects | /r/swaywm | 30 May 2023
    Which rofi you run? The original one from https://github.com/davatorium/rofi (which is Xorg base, so it has to start XWayland) or the Wayland-based fork on https://github.com/lbonn/rofi?
  • windowrule not floating rofi
    1 project | /r/hyprland | 20 Mar 2023
    Rofi does not support wayland you should use https://github.com/lbonn/rofi
  • Starting on my first "real" rice
    1 project | /r/archlinux | 23 Dec 2022
    I think this problem can be solved using Rofi-fork-wayland.
  • Wofi is SO superior to Rofi
    4 projects | /r/swaywm | 13 Dec 2022
    There's a rofi fork that's wayland native and works with the thousands of scripts and themes out there: https://github.com/lbonn/rofi
  • Emacs: Quickly Killing Processes
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Nov 2022
    There's a patched fork of rofi that supports wayland that I'm actually using, but linked the upstream in my OP for general reference: https://github.com/lbonn/rofi#wayland-support
  • rofi-dekstop - A rofi powered, menu driven desktop environment
    2 projects | /r/linux | 22 Oct 2022
    There's a rofi fork that works well in Wayland: https://github.com/lbonn/rofi You need to install this instead of standard rofi
  • What are the differences between bemenu and wofi?
    1 project | /r/swaywm | 10 Oct 2022
    Also, this fork of rofi … https://github.com/lbonn/rofi
  • dmenu not working?
    1 project | /r/swaywm | 20 Aug 2022
    There are replacements for dmenu: standard is wofi (https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi), but it has slightly less functionality (although many people live with it just fine), or there is port of rofi (https://github.com/lbonn/rofi), which is much more capable (you need this fork, the original rofi is X-only). Both of these are packaged in most Linux distributions.
  • is there a word-to-latex converter?
    2 projects | /r/LaTeX | 4 Jun 2022
    I wrote my own web based LaTeX editor I can use if I want access to my LaTeX files from a different computer, something I never would have been able to do if I hadn't learned how the pieces work together (though I actually use neovim over ssh more often).

bemenu

Posts with mentions or reviews of bemenu. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-25.
  • Bash Menu
    4 projects | /r/archlinux | 25 May 2023
    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.
  • Run scripts using keybindings in default settings
    1 project | /r/Fedora | 16 Jan 2023
    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.
  • command line menu / launcher?
    3 projects | /r/commandline | 1 Oct 2022
    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.
  • The end of the nice GTK button
    2 projects | /r/linux | 25 Mar 2022
    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.
  • How to accept text input in swaynag?
    4 projects | /r/swaywm | 4 Mar 2022
    bemenu
  • No_color
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Feb 2022
    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.

  • Identifying the window of Bemenu
    2 projects | /r/swaywm | 7 Feb 2022
    Bemenu - "Dynamic menu library and client program inspired by dmenu"
  • Less Than 10% of Firefox Users on Linux Are Running Wayland
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Feb 2022
  • Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2021
    Instead of rofi, bemenu[2] is nice too.

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

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

  • tessen: an interactive menu to autotype and copy password store data on Wayland, like rofi-pass
    7 projects | /r/bash | 14 Nov 2021
    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.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rofi and bemenu you can also consider the following projects:

arewewaylandyet - Sources for https://arewewaylandyet.com

tessen - an interactive menu to autotype and copy pass and gopass data

rofi-pass - rofi frontend for pass

Sway-DE - 🏠 Sway desktop environment dotfile installation for Arch Linux

password-store-example - Gopass examples

pass-tessen - fuzzy data selection and copy-paste from password store

wtype - xdotool type for wayland

sway - i3-compatible Wayland compositor

grc - generic colouriser