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https://github.com/philj56/tofi

Tiny dynamic menu for Wayland
https://github.com/philj56/tofi

application-launcher c dmenu dmenu-replacement linux sway swaywm wayland wlroots

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Tiny dynamic menu for Wayland

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README 

        
# Tofi



An extremely fast and simple [dmenu](https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) /

[rofi](https://github.com/davatorium/rofi) replacement for

[wlroots](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots)-based

[Wayland](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/) compositors such as

[Sway](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/).



The aim is to do just what I want it to as quick as possible.



When [configured correctly](#performance), tofi can get on screen within a

single frame.



![](screenshot_fullscreen.png)



## Table of Contents

* [Install](#install)

  * [Building](#building)

  * [Arch](#arch)

* [Usage](#usage)

  * [Theming](#theming)

* [Performance](#performance)

  * [Options](#options)

  * [Benchmarks](#benchmarks)

  * [Where is the time spent?](#where-is-the-time-spent)



## Install

### Building



Install the necessary dependencies.



#### For Arch:

```sh

# Runtime dependencies

sudo pacman -S freetype2 harfbuzz cairo pango wayland libxkbcommon



# Build-time dependencies

sudo pacman -S meson scdoc wayland-protocols

```



#### For Fedora

```sh

# Runtime dependencies

sudo dnf install freetype-devel cairo-devel pango-devel wayland-devel libxkbcommon-devel harfbuzz



# Build-time dependencies

sudo dnf install meson scdoc wayland-protocols-devel

```



#### For Debian/Ubuntu



```sh

# Runtime dependencies

sudo apt install libfreetype-dev libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libharfbuzz-dev



# Build-time dependencies

sudo apt install meson scdoc wayland-protocols

```



Then build:

```sh

meson build && ninja -C build install

```



### Arch

Tofi is available in the [AUR](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tofi):

```sh

paru -S tofi

```



## Usage



By default, running `tofi` causes it to act like dmenu, accepting options on

`stdin` and printing the selection to `stdout`.



`tofi-run` is a symlink to `tofi`, which will cause tofi to display a list of

executables under the user's `$PATH`.



`tofi-drun` is also a symlink to `tofi`, which will cause tofi to display a

list of applications found in desktop files as described by the [Desktop Entry

Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html).



To use as a launcher for Sway, add something similar to the following to your

Sway config file:

```

set $menu tofi-run | xargs swaymsg exec --

bindsym $mod+d exec $menu

```



For `tofi-drun`, there are two possible methods:

```

# Launch via Sway

set $drun tofi-drun | xargs swaymsg exec --

bindsym $mod+Shift+d exec $drun



# Launch directly

set $drun tofi-drun --drun-launch=true

bindsym $mod+Shift+d exec $drun

```



See the main [manpage](doc/tofi.1.md) for more info.



### Theming



Tofi supports a fair number of theming options - see the default [config

file](doc/config) or the config file [manpage](doc/tofi.5.md) for a complete

description. Theming is based on the box model shown below:



![Default theme screenshot](screenshot_default.png)



This consists of a box with a border, border outlines and optionally rounded

corners. Text inside the box can either be laid out vertically:

```

╔═══════════════════╗

║ prompt   input    ║

║          result 1 ║

║          result 2 ║

║          ...      ║

╚═══════════════════╝

```

or horizontally:

```

╔═══════════════════════════════════════════╗

║ prompt   input    result 1  result 2  ... ║

╚═══════════════════════════════════════════╝

```

Each piece of text can have its colour customised, and be surrounded by a box

with optionally rounded corners,



A few example themes are included and shown below. Note that you may need to

tweak them to look correct on your display.



[`themes/fullscreen`](themes/fullscreen)

![Fullscreen theme screenshot](screenshot_fullscreen.png)



[`themes/dmenu`](themes/dmenu)

![dmenu theme screenshot](screenshot_dmenu.png)



[`themes/dos`](themes/dos)

![DOS theme screenshot](screenshot_dos.png)



[`themes/dark-paper`](themes/dark-paper)

![Dark paper theme screenshot](screenshot_dark_paper.png)



[`themes/soy-milk`](themes/soy-milk)

![Soy milk theme screenshot](screenshot_soy_milk.png)



## Performance



By default, tofi isn't really any faster than its alternatives. However, when

configured correctly, it can startup and get on screen within a single frame,

or about 2ms in the ideal case.



### Options

In roughly descending order, the most important options for performance are:



* `--font` - This is *by far* the most important option. By default, tofi uses

  [Pango](https://pango.gnome.org/) for font rendering, which (on Linux) looks

  up fonts via

  [Fontconfig](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig/).

  Unfortunately, this font lookup is about as slow as wading through treacle

  (relatively speaking). On battery power on my laptop (Arch linux, AMD Ryzen 5

  5600U), with ~10000 fonts as the output of `fc-list`, loading a single font

  with Pango & Fontconfig takes ~120ms.



  The solution is to pass a path to a font file to `--font`, e.g. `--font

  /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoSansMono-Regular.ttf`. Tofi will then skip any font

  searching, and use [Harfbuzz](https://harfbuzz.github.io/) and

  [Cairo](https://www.cairographics.org/) directly to load the font and display

  text. This massively speeds up startup (font loading takes <1ms). The (minor

  for me) downside is that any character not in the specified font won't render

  correctly, but unless you have commands (or items) with CJK characters or

  emojis in their names, that shouldn't be an issue.

  

* `--width`, `--height` - Larger windows take longer to draw (mostly just for

  the first frame). Again, on battery power on my laptop, drawing a fullscreen

  window (2880px × 1800px) takes ~20ms on the first frame, whereas a dmenu-like

  ribbon (2880px × 60px) takes ~1ms.

  

* `--num-results` - By default, tofi auto-detects how many results will fit in

  the window. This is quite tricky when `--horizontal=true` is passed, and

  leads to a few ms slowdown (only in this case). Setting a fixed number of

  results will speed this up, but since this likely only applies to dmenu-like

  themes (which are already very quick) it's probably not worth setting this.



* `--*-background` - Drawing background boxes around text effectively requires

  drawing the text twice, so specifying a lot of these options can lead to a

  couple of ms slowdown.



* `--hint-font` - Getting really into it now, one of the remaining slow points

  is hinting fonts. For the dmenu theme on battery power on my laptop, with a

  specific font file chosen, the initial text render with the default font

  hinting takes ~4-6ms. Specifying `--hint-font false` drops this to ~1ms. For

  hidpi screens or large font sizes, this doesn't noticeably impact font

  sharpness, but your mileage may vary. This option has no effect if a path to

  a font file hasn't been passed to `--font`.



* `--ascii-input` - Proper Unicode handling is slower than plain ASCII - on the

  order of a few ms for ~40 kB of input. Specifying `--ascii-input true` will

  disable some of this handling, speeding up tofi's startup, but searching for

  non-ASCII characters may not work properly.



* `--late-keyboard-init` - The last avoidable thing that slows down startup is

  initialisation of the keyboard. This only takes 1-2ms on my laptop, but up

  to 60ms on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Passing this option will delay keyboard

  initialisation until after the first draw to screen, meaning that *keypresses

  will be missed* until then, so it's disabled by default.



### Benchmarks



Below are some rough benchmarks of the included themes on different machines.

These were generated with version 0.1.0 of tofi. The time shown is measured

from program launch to Sway reporting that the window has entered the screen.

Results are the mean and standard deviation of 10 runs. All tests were

performed with `--font /path/to/font/file.ttf`, `--hint-font false` and the

equivalent of `--ascii-input true` (as tofi 0.1.0 didn't support Unicode text).



  

    

      

       Theme 

    

    

       fullscreen 

       dmenu 

       dos 

    

  

  

    

       Machine 

       Ryzen 7 3700X 
 2560px × 1440px 

       9.5ms ± 1.8ms 

       5.2ms ± 1.5ms 

       6.1ms ± 1.3ms     

    

       Ryzen 5 5600U (AC) 
 2880px × 1800px 

       17.1ms ± 1.4ms 

       4.0ms ± 0.5ms 

       6.7ms ± 1.1ms 

    

    

       Ryzen 5 5600U (battery) 
 2880px × 1800px 

       28.1ms ± 3.7ms 

       6.0ms ± 1.6ms 

       12.3ms ± 3.4ms 

    

    

       Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W 
 1920px × 1080px 

       119.0ms ± 5.9ms 

       67.3ms ± 10.2ms 

       110.0ms ± 10.3ms 

    

  



The table below additionally includes `--late-keyboard-init` in the arguments.



  

    

      

       Theme 

    

    

       fullscreen 

       dmenu 

       dos 

    

  

  

    

       Machine 

       Ryzen 7 3700X 
 2560px × 1440px 

       7.9ms ± 1.0ms 

       2.3ms ± 0.8ms 

       3.8ms ± 0.8ms     

    

       Ryzen 5 5600U (AC) 
 2880px × 1800px 

       13.4ms ± 0.8ms 

       2.6ms ± 0.5ms 

       5.5ms ± 0.51ms 

    

    

       Ryzen 5 5600U (battery) 
 2880px × 1800px 

       21.8ms ± 1.8ms 

       3.6ms ± 0.7ms 

       8.1ms ± 0.7ms 

    

    

       Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W 
 1920px × 1080px 

       98.3ms ± 5.7ms 

       44.8ms ± 16.3ms 

       87.4ms ± 9.9ms 

    

  



#### Bonus Round: Transparent HugePages



It turns out that it's possible to speed up fullscreen windows somewhat with

some advanced memory tweaks. See [this Stack Overflow

question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73278608/can-mmaps-performance-be-improved-for-shared-memory)

if you want full details, but basically by setting

`/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/shmem_enabled` to `advise`, we can tell

the kernel we're going to be working with large memory areas. This results in

fewer page faults when first allocating memory, speeding up tofi.



Note that I don't recommend you play with this unless you know what you're

doing (I don't), but I've included it just in case, and to show that the

slowdown on large screens is partially due to factors beyond tofi's control.



The table below shows the effects of additionally enabling hugepages from the

table above. The dmenu theme has been skipped, as the window it creates is too

small to benefit from them. The Raspberry Pi is also omitted, as it doesn't

support hugepages.



  

    

      

       Theme 

    

    

       fullscreen 

       dos 

    

  

  

    

       Machine 

       Ryzen 7 3700X 
 2560px × 1440px 

       6.9ms ± 1.1ms 

       3.2ms ± 0.4ms     

    

       Ryzen 5 5600U (AC) 
 2880px × 1800px 

       7.9ms ± 1.2ms 

       3.4ms ± 1.0ms 

    

    

       Ryzen 5 5600U (battery) 
 2880px × 1800px 

       13.7ms ± 0.9ms 

       5.6ms ± 0.8ms 

    

  



### Where is the time spent?



For those who are interested in how much time there is even left to save, I've

plotted the startup performance of version 0.8.0 of `tofi-run` below, alongside

the corresponding debug output. This is the data from 1000 runs of the dmenu

theme on a Ryzen 7 3700X machine, with all performance options set as mentioned

above, along with `--num-results 10`. I've highlighted some points of interest,

most of which are out of tofi's control.



[![Startup performance plot](startup_performance.svg)](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/philj56/tofi/master/startup_performance.svg)



(You may want to click the image to see it at full size).



Note that this is slightly faster than shown in previous benchmarks (with some

runs under 1.5ms!), due to some string handling improvements made in version

0.8.0. Also note that the real performance is slightly better still, as the

performance logging used slows down the code by roughly 10%.



As you can see, there's not a huge amount of time that could even theoretically

be saved. Somewhere around 50% of the startup time is simply spent waiting, and

most of the code isn't parallelisable, as many steps depend on the result of

previous steps. One idea would be to daemonize tofi, skipping much of this

startup. I don't want to do this, however, for two main reasons: complexity,

and I think it's probably about fast enough already!