pappymenu is an application launcher that (unlike dmenu_run and Co.) provides a graphical list of installed applications, according to XDG-standards. It reads desktop entries from $XDG_DATA_DIR/applications (actually, it uses xdg_menu to do this) and builds a nice application launcher, like the GNOME2-applications-menu.

I usually use dmenu_run to launch my applications. But there are some programs that I rarely use and forget the command (or even the application name). pappymenu provides help in those cases by giving me a launcher similar to the application menu found in other DEs (Mate, Xfce, ...).

pappymenu uses xdg_menu under the hood to generate the menu list. It then displays a menu with Gtk3 and upon selecting an entry, it replaces itself with the given command (by calling exec).

• Python 3+
• xdg_menu in your $PATH
• GObject3 bindings for Python 3 (Package python-gobject in Arch, python3-gi in Ubuntu)
• lxml for Python 3 (used to parse the output of xdg_menu)
• python-xdg (XDG standards for Python 3, may be python3-xdg, depending on your distro)

Make sure you have the requirements installed.

Copy pappymenu.py somewhere where you can find it. Run it without arguments to get the menu.

You can bind a key combination to spawn pappymenu, example for herbstluftwm:

herbstclient keybind Mod4-Shift-d spawn ~/src/pappymenu/pappymenu.py

If you install new applications, it might be required to update the menu cache (usually ~/.cache/pappymenu/menu-cache). This can be achieved by running pappymenu with the -r flag, e.g. pappymenu.py -r. The cache will be updated and saved.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for
more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.