Rofi describes itself as a A window switcher, application launcher, ssh dialog, dmenu replacement and more.
And that’s pretty much it. Its super fast and minimal, and works pretty much anywhere. There is even a Wayland clone of it, which I don’t use but at least its there.
Rofi is so good, I got really fired up when my fellow fedizen @hyde mentioned how rofi isn’t for him, and he will stick to the default AwesomeWM launcher, I couldn’t help myself, and decided to write this post and answer to his complaints.
First of all. This is all written in a jokeful manner, no hard feelings or anything.
Seriously? You use pass as your password manager, you use mutt for email, stuff like fzf and a bunch of other tools, you even got a weekly series of CLI tool recommendations. HOW DARE YOU disrespect rofi like THAT!?
Rofi can be integrated with pretty much all of the above. You can use tools such as rofi-pass to autofill your passwords everywhere (kind of better than KeepassXC Browser extensions tbh). You could create many kinds of things with neomutt, like handling mailto: links
You can pretty much pipe whatever you want on rofi, and create general scripts for a ton of stuff. Compared to some launchers that come built-in in some desktop environments or window managers. Rofi will work on them all and can be customized quite a lot.
The only thing that comes close to rofi is one of its inspirations, dmenu. But given that it is even more bare bones and any additions have to be patched (rather than simply configured with rofi). I find it a little harder to sell for most.
I have a few posts sharing scripts, some of them using rofi and its simply fantastic. I’ve a couple other scripts you may be interested in checking out!
I actually recently changed the script to edit tags to use just rofi. You can see some it, as well as some more of my rofi scripts in my dotfiles
This is day 16 of #100DaysToOffload
