Rofi Selectors

Posted on May 9, 2020

rofi is perfect for creating interactive scripts, which I like to call rofi selectors. Here are some examples:

Connecting to bluetooth devices

cat <<DEVICES | rofi -width 30 -dmenu -i -p "Devices"  \
              | awk '{printf $1}' \
              | xargs bluetoothctl connect \
# List of devices to connect
00:16:94:2F:AC:18 Sennheiser Headphone
01:16:94:2F:AC:18 Anker Headphone
DEVICES

First rofi displays the MAC addresses and names of the bluetooth headphones that I use, then awk parses the appropriate field (the MAC address in this case), and xargs call the appropriate command (bluetoothctl in this case) to connect to that headphone. I use heredocs so that I can add the list of devices at the end of the command. Note the trick of adding a \ after the last command so that the comment # List of devices is parsed as part of the command rather than part of the heredoc.

I have stored this file as ~/bin/bt-connect. To use it for the first time, I call rofi -show run (which is mapped to MOD+p in my setup) and type /home/username/bin/bt-connect. From then onwards, rofi remembers the previously typed command and I can simply do MDO+p and then type bt-connect, and select the appropriate headphone. No more fiddling around with blueman-applet!

Accessing frequently used information

I often have to fill forms where I need to know the project ids for the different projects that I am working on. So, I have created a command ~/bin/project-ids as follows

cat <<PROJECTS | rofi -width 20 -dmenu -i -p "Project"  \
               | awk '{printf $1}' \
               | xclip -selection clipboard \
# List of Projects
123456 Project 1
123456 Project 2
123456 Project 3
PROJECTS

The basic structure of the command is the same as before. Display the list of options (project-id and project-name) using rofi, parse the appropriate field using awk, but in this case, I copy the parsed field to the clipboard. This way I can simply paste it in the form where I need it.

Parsing dynamic information

Again, I need to fill forms with student ids. I have an XML file which contains details of students, including student ids. It is easy to use rofi selectors for this situation. I have written a script (written in crystal, but it can be written in your favorite language), which simply outputs the list of student-ids and names, and then I pass the output to rofi.

/path-to-script/student-id
    | rofi -width 40 -dmenu -i -p "Name"  \
    | awk '{printf $1}' \
    | xclip -selection clipboard

Copying passwords

I use pass as a password manager. pass stores the passwords as encrypted files insider ~/.password-store. The next selector reads the website/usernames for which a password is available, selects the username using rofi and passes the result to pass -c, which copies the password to clipboard for 45 sec.

cd $HOME/.password-store && fd -t f  \
    | sed 's/\.gpg$//'  \
    | rofi -width 30 -dmenu -i -p "pass" \
    | xargs pass -c 

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| Multiple versions of a library>

This entry was posted in Efficiency and tagged rofi, heredoc, awk, xargs, xclip.