Tux Training

Dmenu is one of my favorite parts of #! CrunchBang’s theme pack and pre-configured version of Openbox, as well as  wmii, and dwm on any distro, but it was always somewhat of a mystery to me how it actually picks up the programs it can find – well, that was until tonight, when I took a look at the associated scripts.

Let’s say you installed a little python script that you want to be able to call from dmenu – I placed it into /home/<username>/bin with the hope dmenu would just pick it up magically, but no such luck – would have been too easy anyways. It is not much harder though, because all it needs is for you to create a symbolic link to the executable you want to start inside /usr/bin/ and dmenu will automagically find it! To do so, just type

sudo ln -s /path/to/your/file /usr/bin/symlinkname

and to make it a little more clear, let’s say we have a program called “helloworld” in /home/<username>/bin and want to call it from dmenu by the name “helloworld”. For this to work we would type:

sudo ln -s /home/<username>/bin/helloworld /usr/bin/helloworld

Ummm…yes, that’s it already – short HOWTO, but good to know none-the-less!

There is another way to add applications, especially if you created a new directory that will hold executables:

Symbolic links work or you could add:

PATH="/home/<username>/bin:$PATH"

to your .profile
By adding the new folder to your $PATH environment, dmenu will find those executables; because that’s how it does it magic, by just searching $PATH