Smenu (Swift menu) is a remake of the suckless tool dmenu, tailored for the macOS ecosystem. It aims to be a minimalistic tool reading a list of options and serving the user a stylish prompt for selecting one of those options, forwarding that to the next command in the pipeline.
If no input is forwarded to smenu on launch, it will serve as a simple text prompt, accepting any text input whatsoever.
printf "apple\npear\nlemon\n" | smenu
When you start typing, the options get filtered out, and selecting an option simply prints that out, making it easy to perform user selections in all kinds of scripts without requiring a dedicated terminal to be open.
To install, simply clone it, navigate to the project repo and run the following:
make install
If you don't have make installed, you can run the make commands manually:
xcodebuild -scheme smenu -configuration Release;
cp -r ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/smenu-*/Build/Products/Release/smenu.app /Applications/;
Then launch smenu by either using the smenu.sh script or by launching it directly from within the app:
/Applications/smenu.app/Contents/MacOS/smenu
If you have a bunch of files in the downloads folder, it can be daunting to open finder, navigating to downloads and look for the file with a name you vaguely remember. With smenu, that's easy:
ls -1 ~/Downloads | smenu | xargs -I{} open ~/Downloads/{}
All of the files:
Found it!
Usage: smenu [-e] [-t TEXT_PROMPT] [-i ICON]
-e Use encrypted input. Replaces all input characters with dots.
-t TEXT_PROMPT Use custom text prompt instead of the default "Select something" prompt.
-i ICON Use a custom icon instead of the lightning bolt. Replace with any SF Symbols icon identifier (e.g. "binoculars.fill").