Rofi: A window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement
Please match the documentation and scripts to the version of rofi used
Also see the locally installed documentation (manpages).
Rofi
A window switcher, Application launcher and dmenu replacement.
Rofi started as a clone of simpleswitcher, written by Sean Pringle - a popup window switcher roughly based on superswitcher. Simpleswitcher laid the foundations, and therefore Sean Pringle deserves most of the credit for this tool. Rofi (renamed, as it lost the simple property) has been extended with extra features, like an application launcher and ssh-launcher, and can act as a drop-in dmenu replacement, making it a very versatile tool. Thanks to the great work of lbonn, who added Wayland support in his fork and maintained it for years, Rofi now officially supports Wayland (since 2025).
Rofi, like dmenu, will provide the user with a textual list of options where one or more can be selected. This can either be running an application, selecting a window, or options provided by an external script.
What is rofi not?
Rofi is not:
A UI toolkit.
A library to be used in other applications.
An application that can support every possible use-case. It tries to be generic enough to be usable by everybody.
- Specific functionality can be added using scripts or plugins, many exist.
Just a dmenu replacement. The dmenu functionality is a nice 'extra' to rofi, not its main purpose.
Table of Contents
Features
Its main features are:
Fully configurable keyboard navigation
Type to filter
- Tokenized: type any word in any order to filter
- Case insensitive (togglable) or SmartCase
- Support for fuzzy-, regex-, prefix-, and glob-matching
UTF-8 enabled
- UTF-8-aware string collating
- International keyboard support (`e -> è)
RTL language support
Cairo drawing and Pango font rendering
Built-in modes:
Window switcher mode
- EWMH compatible WM
- Workarounds for i3,bspwm
- Wayland based WMs that follow the wlr family
Application launcher
Desktop file application launcher
SSH launcher mode
File browser
Combi mode, allowing several modes to be merged into one list
History-based ordering — last 25 choices are ordered on top based on use (optional)
Levenshtein distance or fzf like sorting of matches (optional)
Drop-in dmenu replacement
- Many added improvements
Easily extensible using scripts and plugins
Advanced Theming
Modes
Rofi has several built-in modes implementing common use cases and can be extended by scripts (either called from Rofi or calling Rofi) or plugins.
Below is a list of the different modes:
run: launch applications from $PATH, with option to launch in terminal.
drun: launch applications based on desktop files. It tries to be compliant to the XDG standard.
window: Switch between windows on an EWMH compatible window manager.
ssh: Connect to a remote host via ssh.
filebrowser: A basic file-browser for opening files.
keys: list internal keybindings.
script: Write (limited) custom mode using simple scripts.
combi: Combine multiple modes into one.
Rofi is known to work on Linux and BSD.
Wayland support
Build
Please follow the build instructions to build rofi.
Wayland support is enabled by default, along with X11/xcb.
rofi can also be built without X11/xcb or wayland, but at least one backend should be enabled:
meson build -Dxcb=disabled
meson build -Dwayland=disabled
Usage
Rofi should automatically select the xcb or wayland backend depending on the environment it is run on.
To force the use of the xcb backend (if enabled during build), the -x11
option can be used:
rofi -x11 ...
Missing features in Wayland mode
Due to the different architecture and available APIs in Wayland mode, some original rofi features are difficult or impossible to replicate
-normal-windowflag. Though it is also considered as a toy/deprecated feature in Upstream rofi. Not impossible but would require some work.-monitor -nfor fine-grained selection of monitor to display rofi on- some window locations parameters work partially,
x-offsetandy-offsetare only working from screen edges - fake transparency
- window mode on KWin which implements different protocols than the wlr family
Wayland DPI
On wayland, the output is only known after the first surface is shown. This makes sizing
rofi windows in absolute size (mm) very difficult, a problem unique for rofi,
as the actual DPI is unknown beforehand. This can be worked around by manually
passing the right DPI via configuration system. If the dpi config option is
set to 0 and only one monitor is connected rofi will use the DPI of the only
connected monitor or if you have multiple monitors and you specify a monitor
name, it will use the DPI of that monitor.
Manpage
For more up to date information, please see the manpages. The other sections and links might have outdated information as they have relatively less maintenance than the manpages. So, if you come across any issues please consult manpages, discussion and issue tracker before filing new issue.
- Manpages:
Installation
Please see the installation guide for instructions on how to install Rofi.
Quickstart
Usage
This section just gives a brief overview of the various options. To get the full set of options see the manpages section above
Running rofi
To launch rofi directly in a certain mode, specify a mode with rofi -show <mode>.
To show the run dialog:
rofi -show run
Or get the options from a script:
~/my_script.sh | rofi -dmenu
Specify an ordered, comma-separated list of modes to enable. Enabled modes can
be changed at runtime. Default key is Ctrl+Tab. If no modes are specified,
all configured modes will be enabled. To only show the run and ssh
launcher:
rofi -modes "run,ssh" -show run
The modes to combine in combi mode.
For syntax to -combi-modes, see -modes.
To get one merge view, of window,run, and ssh:
rofi -show combi -combi-modes "window,run,ssh" -modes combi
Configuration
Generate a default configuration file
mkdir -p ~/.config/rofi
rofi -dump-config > ~/.config/rofi/config.rasi
This creates a file called config.rasi in the ~/.config/rofi/ folder. You
can modify this file to set configuration settings and modify themes.
config.rasi is the file rofi looks to by default.
Please see the configuration guide for a summary of configuration options. More detailed options are provided in the manpages.
Themes
Please see the themes manpages for a detailed description.
The latest bundled themes can be found here.
Screenshots
Rezlooks:
Arthur:
Default theme:
Wiki
| ❗ The Wiki is currently unmaintained and might contain outdated data |
|---|
Contents
- User scripts
- Examples
- dmenu Specs
- mode Specs
- F.A.Q..
- Script mode
- Creating an issue
- Creating a Pull request
Discussion places
The GitHub Discussions is the preferred location for discussions.
- GitHub Discussions
- IRC (#rofi on irc.libera.chat)
Stargazers over time
