John's dmenu

This is my build of suckless's dmenu. I have applied the following patches:

• The border patch, to add a window border
• The center patch, which displays dmenu in the center of the screen
• The grid patch, which adds the option of displaying items in a grid (or a vertical list)
• The line height patch, which adds the ability to specify a minimum line height
• The password patch, which adds a flag for censoring the input (e.g. for use if dmenu is used as a password prompt)
• The vertfull patch, which tweaks item indentation in grid mode
• The xresources patch, which reads dmenu colors and fonts from Xresources

Additionally, I've made a couple tweaks on top of these patches:

• When the number of lines is set to be more than zero, the prompt is displayed on a separate line above the input field
• The TEXTW macro used to calculate input text width as it would be displayed on the screen has been tweaked to be more performant. For large input sequences (hundreds of lines), I noticed quite a bit of slowdown when using the center patch. This is due to the fact that this patch must compute the width of each line of text up-front to determine the geometry of the dmenu window. I have substituted TEXTW's drw_fontset_getwidth-based implementation with one based on strlen, which is much faster. My implementation is less accurate, as it assumes all characters are the same width (and probably doesn't handle multi-byte unicode characters quite right either. However, I have found that a reasonable level of accuracy is maintained while the performance of this function has increased my many orders of magnitude.

To install, simply

cp config.def.h config.h
# Edit config.h to your liking
make
sudo make install

For some example dmenu-based scripts, see my dotfiles repo (scripts are located in .local/bin/dmenu).