bemenu

Dynamic menu library and client program inspired by dmenu

Building

# Build everything
make

# To build only certain features, pass the targets which you are interested into
#
# You can also use the following meta-targets for common features:
# - clients (bemenu, bemenu-run)
# - x11
# - wayland
# - curses
#
# For example this would build the bemenu and bemenu-run binaries and the x11 renderer:
make clients x11

# To install the built features, simply run:
make install

# NOTE: You may get errors during install when not building all the features.
#       These errors are free to ignore if `Install OK!` is printed.

# By default that will install to /usr/local, but you can change this with PREFIX
make install PREFIX=/usr

# Other usual variables are available for modifying such as DESTDIR, bindir, libdir and mandir
# Note that if you want a custom PREFIX or libdir, you should pass those during build as well,
# since they will be used compile-time to figure out where to load renderers from!

# HTML API documentation (requires doxygen installed):
make doxygen

OSX

# Make sure you have GNU Make and pkg-config installed
brew install make pkg-config

# You may need to setup your pkg-config to point to the brew version of the libraries
# For example to build curses renderer, you'd do:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/ncurses/lib/pkgconfig" gmake curses

# Other than that, follow the normal build steps, but use gmake instead of make

Dependencies

All dependencies are searched with pkg-config

Renderer	Dependencies
curses	ncurses
x11	x11, xinerama, cairo, pango, pangocairo
Wayland	wayland-client, wayland-protocols, cairo, pango, pangocairo, xbkcommon

Environment variables

Variable	Description	Value
BEMENU_OPTS	Options for bemenu, bemenu-run from env	Any cli argument
BEMENU_BACKEND	Forces a renderer by name	x11, wayland, curses
BEMENU_RENDERER	Forces a renderer by loading a .so file	Path to the .so file
BEMENU_RENDERERS	Override renderer load directory	Path to a directory

About Wayland support

Wayland is only supported by compositors that implement the wlr-layer-shell protocol. Typically wlroots-based compositors.

License

• GNU GPLv3 (or any later version) for client program[s] and other sources except library and bindings
• GNU LGPLv3 (or any later version) for library and bindings