Rofi Archive

A window switcher, run dialog and dmenu replacement

View project onGitHub

Installation guide

DEPENDENCY

For building:

  • C compiler that supports the c99 standard. (gcc or clang)
  • make
  • autoconf
  • automake (1.11.3 or up)
  • pkg-config
  • Developer packages of the external libraries

External libraries

  • libpango
  • libpangocairo
  • libcairo
  • libcairo-xcb
  • libglib2.0 >= 2.40
  • libstartup-notification-1.0
  • libxkbcommon >= 0.5.0
  • libxkbcommon-x11
  • libxcb (sometimes split, you need libxcb, libxcb-xkb and libxcb-xinerama)
  • xcb-util
  • xcb-util-wm (sometimes split as libxcb-ewmh and libxcb-icccm)
  • xcb-util-xrm new module, can be found here

On debian based systems, the developer packages are in the form of: <package>-dev on rpm based <package>-devel.

Install from a release

Check dependencies and configure build system:

./configure

Build Rofi:

make

The actual install, execute as root (if needed):

make install

Install a checkout from git

The GitHub Pages version of these directions may be out of date. Please use INSTALL.md from the online repo or your local repository.

Pull in dependencies

git submodule update --init

Generate build system:

autoreconf -i

Create a build directory:

mkdir build

Enter build directory:

cd build

Check dependencies and configure build system:

../configure

Build rofi:

make

The actual install, execute as root (if needed):

make install

Options for configure

When you run the configure step there are several you can configure. (To see the full list type ./configure --help ).

The most useful one to set the installation prefix:

./configure --prefix=<installation path>

f.e.

./configure --prefix=/usr/

Install locally

or to install locally:

./configure --prefix=${HOME}/.local/

Options for make

When you run make you can tweak the build process a little.

Verbose output

Show the commands called:

make V=1

Debug build

Compile with debug symbols and no optimization

make CFLAGS="-O0 -g3" clean rofi

Get a backtrace

Getting a backtrace using GDB is not very handy. Because if rofi get stuck, it grabs keyboard and mouse. So if it crashes in GDB you are stuck. The best way to go is to enable core file. (ulimit -c unlimited in bash) then make rofi crash. You can then load the core in GDB.

gdb rofi core

Install distribution

Debian or Ubuntu

apt-get install rofi

Fedora

rofi from russianfedora repository and also Yaroslav’s COPR (Cool Other Package Repo)