Fuzzel

Fuzzel is a Wayland-native application launcher and fuzzy finder, inspired by rofi and dmenu.

Screenshot

Fuzzel, with transparency, on top of a browser window showing a diff of a fuzzel commit

Features

For app launching

• Fuzzy-find applications from a list and launch them
• Icon support
• Remembers frequently launched applications
• Customize which .desktop files are searched
• Option to filter apps based on OnlyShowIn and NotShowIn
• Startup notification support
• Launch prefix option to customize how apps are launched
• Display a large icon of current selection if there are only a few matches
• Option to display executables in $PATH
• Option to execute the input rather than return an app
• Support for localized strings

For dmenu mode

• dmenu mode where newline separated entries are read from STDIN
• Support for Rofi's protocol to support icons
• Optional cache with custom path
• Password mode
• Prompt-only mode
• Exact-match option to support multi-stage menus
• Option to return index of what's selected rather than what's selected
• Some dmenu option compatibility. Invoking it as dmenu enables dmenu mode
• Option for null-separated input

For all modes

• Numerous customizable key bindings, based on Emacs
• Mouse support
• Paste support
• Emoji support
• A number of theming options, which can be set in a separate include file
• fzf-style matching with ability to filter huge lists
• Optimized for performance
• Zsh and Fish completions
• Support for true fractional scaling
• Wayland native

For details, see man fuzzel and man fuzzel.ini

Requirements

Runtime

• pixman
• wayland (client and cursor libraries)
• xkbcommon
• cairo (optional, required by librsvg)
• libpng (optional)
• librsvg (optional, for enhanced SVG icon support)
• fcft ¹

Fuzzel uses the builtin nanosvg backend to render SVG icons by default. Since nanosvg is somewhat limited, we also offer a librsvg backend for SVG icons. Note that librsvg also requires cairo.

Building

• meson
• ninja
• wayland protocols
• scdoc
• tllist ¹

Installation

To build, first, create a build directory, and switch to it:

mkdir -p bld/release && cd bld/release

Second, configure the build (if you intend to install it globally, you might also want --prefix=/usr):

meson --buildtype=release \
    -Denable-cairo=disabled|enabled|auto \
    -Dpng-backend=none|libpng \
    -Dsvg-backend=none|librsvg|nanosvg \
    ../..

-D{png,svg}-backend can be used to force-enable or force-disable a specific png and/or svg backend. Note that nanosvg is builtin (i.e. it needs to external dependencies).

-Denable-cairo can be used to force-enable or force-disable cairo support. When disabled, fuzzel will not be able to draw rounded corners, nor will it support SVGs using the librsvg backend.

Three, build it:

ninja

You can now run it directly from the build directory:

./fuzzel

Use command line arguments to configure the look-and-feel:

./fuzzel --help

Optionally, install it:

ninja install

For more detailed configuration information, see the man pages:

man fuzzel
man fuzzel.ini

Testing

Fuzzel has some automated tests in test/. To run them, Fish shell and wtype are required. The test runner can be installed within Fish shell with:

fisher install jorgebucaran/fishtape

Once installed, the tests can be run with:

fishtape test/*.fish

License

Fuzzel is released under the MIT license.

Fuzzel uses nanosvg, released under the Zlib license.

Sponsoring/donations

• Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/dnkl
• GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/dnkl

---

1. can also be built as subprojects, in which case they are statically linked. ↩︎