For several years already, I have been using a manjaro distro with an i3 tiling windows manager on my home tower. By default, manjaro comes with its own version of dmenu, which is pretty vanilla. What I lack on a daily basis on my screen is an easy-to-access calculator. I tried patching/manually building dmenu to have an integrated calculator, but I ended up in conflicts. For me, it was a bit of a high price to pay for patching and rebuilding endlessly rather than to reach ipython for a simple calculation. Besides, dmenu seems to be the right place to have it.

Today I learned, that one can install a rust port of dmenu that can be extended to have an integrated calculator. First we enforce uninstall with d of the built-in dmenu:

yay -Rdd dmenu-manjaro

Clone the repo from the github (We need the git version for the calc):

git clone https://github.com/Shizcow/dmenu-rs.git

Add calc plugin to config.mk:

PLUGINS = calc

Then run:

make && sudo make install

And we would need to add a key binding to .i3/config to run the calculator. Here are the 2 key bindings for dmenu_run and dmenu_run --calc

bindsym $mod+d exec --no-startup-id dmenu_run
bindsym $mod+equal exec --no-startup-id dmenu_run --calc

Now press $mod key (Win key in my case) and = and voilà, it’s alive! Enjoy!