pappymenu is an application launcher that (unlike dmenu_run and Co.) provides a graphical list of installed applications, according to XDG-standards. It reads desktop entries from $XDG_DATA_DIR/applications (actually, it uses xdg_menu to do this) and builds a nice application launcher, like the GNOME2-applications-menu.

Why?

I usually use dmenu_run to launch my applications. But there are some programs that I rarely use and forget the command (or even the application name). pappymenu provides help in those cases by giving me a launcher similar to the application menu found in other DEs (Mate, Xfce, ...).

How?

pappymenu uses xdg_menu under the hood to generate the menu list. It then displays a menu with Gtk3 and upon selecting an entry, it replaces itself with the given command (by calling exec).

Requirements

• Python 3+
• xdg_menu in your $PATH
• GObject3 bindings for Python 3 (Package python-gobject in Arch, python3-gi in Ubuntu)
• lxml for Python 3 (used to parse the output of xdg_menu)
• python-xdg (XDG standards for Python 3, may be python3-xdg, depending on your distro)

Installation

Make sure you have the requirements installed.

Copy pappymenu.py somewhere where you can find it. Run it without arguments to get the menu.

You can bind a key combination to spawn pappymenu, example for herbstluftwm:

herbstclient keybind Mod4-Shift-d spawn ~/src/pappymenu/pappymenu.py

Updating the menu

If you install new applications, it might be required to update the menu cache (usually ~/.cache/pappymenu/menu-cache). This can be achieved by running pappymenu with the -r flag, e.g. pappymenu.py -r. The cache will be updated and saved.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for
more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.