this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024

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Why is wofi recommended so much? (iusearchlinux.fyi)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

TL;DR: Wofi is unmaintained

Wofi is a launcher/menu for wlroots based compositors.

The description on the sourcehut says that it's not actively maintained. Looking at the commits confirms this: The most recent commit was 4 months ago, and the 10th most recent 10 months ago. The creator also confirms this again in a reddit comment. (libreddit link)

Yet in most places I look (sway wiki 1, sway wiki 2*, hyprland wiki**, gentoo wiki, arch wiki sway, arch wiki hyprland, awesome hyprland**) it's at least listed somewhere, often near or at the top, with no mention of the maintenance status. I also searched for comments on lemmy containing wofi and only one of them mentioned that it's unmaintained, and that under a post that's seemingly deleted.

*edited by me just now

**filing an issue (or maybe pr) tomorrow when I'm less tired

I guess it still works perfectly fine, and I'm ok with using unmaintained software (Android 9), but I'm sure there are people who would like to know that.

While I'm here, I'd like to highlight that there is an active rofi fork that supports wayland with full functionality, which is a great alternative to wofi.

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[+] [email protected] 35 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I put that there to make clear that I don't care at all if software I use (important or not) isn't maintained.

[+] [email protected] -8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Correct. The OS will still function for a long while, because it provides all the basic stuff it needs. Wofi, on the other hand, could stop working for people tomorrow, because a dependency updated and Wofi has not been updated to support a new syntax or API.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes and no: an unmaintained android will have trouble running newer apps due to older versions of SDK, and you pretty much can't do anything about it (AFAIK), but older software can be nixed/flatpaked or even statically compiled/appimaged (and we can pretty much expect no trouble on the kernel side due to their "not breaking userspace" mantra)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

True, but when the android SDK gets to old, it's been years since it was last released. Most apps these days still support Android 6. A thing depending on wlroots, will likely break on the next wlroots update. I do get your point though. Anything that is unmaintained is at risc of breaking at any point.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago

I don't use wofi, but in general - what's there to maintain? It's a launcher. There are no new novel ways popping up constantly to launch applications.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Wofi ok. Rofi-Wayland great. Tofi awesome and enough for my use case.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Wofi is still working fine with wayfire. It's actually still offered on Arch as part of the "extra" repository:

% pacman -Ss wofi
extra/wofi 1.3-2 [installed]
    launcher for wlroots-based wayland compositors

To be honest, I found it more straight forward than rofi, but I could still use rofi if it worked well on wayland. I've never used tofi, and it doesn't seem like a drop-in replacement for wofi. But I guess it's worth trying. It's seems less graphical than wofi though...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Does Rofi-Wayland support custom css the same way wofi does? If so I'll gladly switch, I really appreciate the ease of customizing wofi.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

https://github.com/lbonn/rofi

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It seems like it doesn't, which is my favorite feature wofi has.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Tofi is so ugly tho. Do you have any cool dotfiles to share? :D

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

4 month ago is not that bad for such a small project. Eww looks more active, but I don't have the patience to learn how to create a menu. Its way too DIY for me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I've just been using fzf with a floating terminal window, and it's been great. I don't understand the need for rofi/wofi/dmenu.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is there a specific setup for this? I've not used fzf

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Here is an example: https://erfur.github.io/2021/11/20/fzf_as_dmenu.html

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

probably bc wofi may be in more repos n package managers afaik, seems like a popularity issue for rofi-wayland more than a more conscious decision to not recommend it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Yeah, Rofi-wayland doesn't work as well as it should. Maybe it works if you are using the default config or something similar but for me it is supposed to show at the top of the screen, dmenu-style, but it instead shows under my bar rather than over it, as it should. Bemenu, with j4-dmenu-desktop work just as well for me on Wayland, as rofi did on Xorg.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Kidding? Can't tell if joke

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Why would I be kidding? /genq