dmenu on Scrotwm - launched apps dont appear

N

nickednamed

For your information, I'm new to all this [first non windows experience], running / trying out FreeBSD 8.1 Release, Scrotwm 0.9.25, dmenu 4.1.1, Xorg 7.5 on an oracle VM virtual machine.

I've settled on Scrotwm, which I love, but so far haven't managed to solve a problem which has been bugging me; when i launch applications from dmenu, they don't seem to appear anywhere.

I'm sure they are running, as some applications, cmus for example, say so if i try to launch them again. What's more, if i exit Scrotwm [Mod1+Shift+Q] i go back to a terminal with [sometimes unreadable] apps that i just launched via dmenu.

Im not running any graphical apps at the moment; mainly ee, elinks, cmus, top and vifm.

The only way i can launch apps at the moment is by opening up a terminal and typing "cmus" or something like that.

The only thing i've managed to find out so far [from the dmenu manpage] is that when i hit return, dmenu will "print the selected item to standard output". Is this relevant?

I've searched the forum, the scrotwm forum, the dmenu mailing list, googled around, but haven't seen anything directly relevant yet.

What should i do in order to get dmenu to open apps in new *displayed* windows?

Thanks in advance.
 
Just got round to installing opera on my virtual FreeBSD machine. It opens fine from dmenu. It opens up a new window, according to my current layout [full screen, tiled, etc], without any problems.

Am I to understand from the lack of responses that I'm asking a dumb question, or no one has had this problem?
 
You can't launch terminal apps from dmenu. Well, you can, but in order to see and interact with stdin/stdout, they have be launched by an X terminal. Dmenu is primarily for launching X apps.

You can also get the behaviour I suspect you're after by creating shell scripts containing something along the lines of:

Code: 
xterm -e cmus

And then launch the shell scripts from dmenu.
 
Great! Exactly what i needed to know.

Just out of interest, do any of the alternatives to dmenu handle console apps any better?

Where can I learn more about "stdin/stdout", as google searches have been rather unfruitful and I don't really know where else to turn.. :-/
 
nickednamed said:
Just out of interest, do any of the alternatives to dmenu handle console apps any better?
Click to expand...
I don't think so. There's no accurate way to detect when an app uses stdin/stdout.

nickednamed said:
Where can I learn more about "stdin/stdout", as google searches have been rather unfruitful and I don't really know where else to turn.. :-/
Click to expand...
Maybe this will help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_streams

As you use Unix more you'll understand better.
 
Thank you very much.

I know the reply is somewhat late, but it really helped.

Will mark this thread solved as soon as i can.
 
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