[okbake]

I pipe a list of installed programs into dmenu and have it run whichever one I select. I have this bound to Mod+p. dmenu has fuzzy search, so if I want to open firefox I can just type `Mod+p fox <cr>`. Not quite as fast as having dedicated hotkeys, but it also covers all installed programs on the system (or some small subset if I want).

Having programs available from anywhere with just a few keystrokes makes everything feel very accessible. Whenever I want to run something I just need to type a few characters of the binaries name to launch it.

I use a similiar set up for ssh, where I pipe the Hosts from my ~/.ssh/config into dmenu and only need to type part of the hostname to connect.

[dmenu] http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/

[fiatjaf]

dmenu takes 2 seconds to open on my computer. It's horrible. But I use it too little to worry about changing it.

My question is: how do you open ssh from dmenu? I can't open terminal applications from dmenu, it should open a terminal automatically, I guess, but it doesn't do anything. Is that controlled by some other Linux configuration? I'm on Ubuntu with i3.

[tmearnest]

You'd need either write a special dmenu script to run it in an xterm, or add a simple script to your path:

#!/bin/sh

exec xterm -e ssh user@hostname