pri3o-dmenu-desktop

Description

pri3o-dmenu-desktop is a drop-in replacement for Michael Stapelberg's i3-dmenu-desktop that adds simple application priorization. It supports all options present in i3-dmenu-desktop and a few more.

At this point priority is simply the absolute number times the program was run. For example a program ran three times has a higher priority than a program only run twice. It's very simple but pretty effective. In the future I might add a time-based component as well.

The priority data is stored in a sqlite database in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pri3o-dmenu-desktop/dmenu.db (defaults to ~/.config/pri3o-dmenu-desktop/dmenu.db) but a custom location can be specified via command line parameter. A new db will be create if it does not exist yet.

Requirements

To run this you need Python 3, all used libraries should be present in the standard distribution. Python 3 should already be present in any modern, non-minimal distribution. For older/LTS distributions (e.g. CentOS 7) you may need to install it.

For RedHat based distros this can be done via:

yum install python3

For Debian based distros use:

apt install python3

Installing

The easiest way to install is using pip3:

pip3 install pri3o_dmenu_desktop

Running

Just run using

pri3o-dmenu-desktop [OPTIONS]

If run without parameters, will behave like i3-dmenu-desktop without parameters. The optional commandline parameters are:

• -d, --database=PATH path to database file; default $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pri3o-dmenu-desktop/dmenu.db
• -e, --entry-type=TYPE display "Name" (TYPE=name), "Exec" (TYPE=command) or .desktop filename (TYPE=filename) in dmenu, default name
• -l, --locale=LOCALE use LOCALE (e.g. en_GB) for localisation of "Name", default is system locale
• -m, --dmenu=COMMAND run this command for dmenu, default dmenu -i
• -t, --term=COMMAND use this command for programs that need to be run in a terminal, default i3-sensible-terminal -e

Speed

As some people may wonder about how fast it is:

 % time pri3o-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
pri3o-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,06s user 0,01s system 99% cpu 0,070 total

 % time i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,11s user 0,01s system 99% cpu 0,114 total

 % time j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,00s user 0,00s system 97% cpu 0,006 total

On my system (SSD-only) it is slightly faster than i3-dmenu-desktop, but still much slower than j4-dmenu-desktop. For all practical purposes these differences should be negligible unless you have a lot of applications and/or a slow hard drive.

For comparison I ran the tests on an old Lenovo T61 with HDD, where the delay is definitely noticable. These values are always for the second run (after the .desktop files where in RAM). For the first run you can add around 800ms on top.

 % time pri3o-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
pri3o-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,13s user 0,02s system 99% cpu 0,154 total

 % time i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,35s user 0,02s system 99% cpu 0,376 total

 % time j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,00s user 0,01s system 96% cpu 0,011 total