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dmenu: command not found

by Deepika

dmenu is a command-line program for Unix-like operating systems that provides a dynamic menu for launching other programs. It is commonly used as a launcher in window managers that follow the Unix philosophy of modularity and reusability. dmenu reads a list of newline-separated items from stdin, and shows them in a vertically scrolling list. The user can then select an item by typing a part of the item’s text and pressing Enter. The selected item is then printed to stdout.

If you encounter the below error while running the command dmenu:

dmenu: command not found

you may try installing the below package as per your choice of distribution:

Distribution Command
Debian apt-get install suckless-tools
Ubuntu apt-get install suckless-tools
Alpine apk add dmenu
Arch Linux pacman -S dmenu
Kali Linux apt-get install suckless-tools
Fedora dnf install dmenu
OS X brew install dmenu
Raspbian apt-get install suckless-tools

dmenu Command Examples

1. Display a menu of the output of the `ls` command:

# ls | dmenu

2. Display a menu with custom items separated by a new line (`\n`):

# echo -e "red\ngreen\nblue" | dmenu

3. Let the user choose between multiple items and save the selected one to a file:

# echo -e "red\ngreen\nblue" | dmenu > color.txt

4. Launch dmenu on a specific monitor:

# ls | dmenu -m 1

5. Display dmenu at the bottom of the screen:

# ls | dmenu -b

Filed Under: Linux

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