mate-hud

Provides a way to run menubar commands through rofi, much like the Unity 7 Heads-Up Display (HUD). mate-hud was originally forked from i3-hud-menu:

• https://jamcnaughton.com/2015/10/19/hud-for-xubuntu/
• https://github.com/jamcnaughton/i3-hud-menu
• https://github.com/RafaelBocquet/i3-hud-menu

It was subsequently improved by incorporating improvements from snippins

• HUD.py

What is a HUD and why should I care?

A Heads-Up Display (HUD) allows you to search through an application's appmenu. So if you're trying to find that single filter in Gimp but can't remember which filter category it fits into or if you can't recall if preferences sits under File, Edit or Tools on your favourite browser, you can just search for it rather than hunting through the menus.

Implementation

vala-panel-appmenu includes an implementation of the com.canonical.AppMenu.Registrar DBus service. Applications exporting their menu via dbusmenu need this service to run. mate-hud.py tries to get the menu of the currently focused window, lists possible actions and asks the user which one to run. mate-hud.py, binds itself to the Alt_L keyboard shortcut by default (can be changed in the settings GUI).

Settings

mate-hud includes a small GUI for configuring settings: hud-settings.py which should show up in your applications menu. mate-hud.py reads two gsettings keys:

• org.mate.hud: shortcut (Default: 'Alt_L')
• org.mate.hud: rofi-theme (Default: mate-hud)

mate-hud.py will not execute until those gsettings keys are created, which the mate-hud Debian package will do, and the enabled key is set to True using something like dconf-editor.

mate-hud can be enabled or disabled by MATE Tweak under Panel > Panel Features > Enable HUD.

Themes

mate-hud.py uses the mate-hud-rounded theme by default. The included mate-hud and mate-hud-rounded themes and their HiDPI variants try to use colors from your GTK theme and your system font. You can see the available themes and make changes with the included settings program.

Manual Setup

• The vala-panel-appmenu applet for MATE or XFCE should be added to a panel.
• mate-hud.py should be started on session start-up.
• The following should be added to the users ~/.profile or /etc/profile.d or /etc/X11/Xsession.d/.

if [ -n "$GTK_MODULES" ]; then
    GTK_MODULES="$GTK_MODULES:unity-gtk-module"
else
    GTK_MODULES="unity-gtk-module"
fi

export GTK_MODULES
export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=1

Dependencies

• appmenu-qt
• gir1.2-gtk-3.0
• mate-desktop
• python3
• python3-dbus
• python3-pyinotify
• python3-setproctitle
• python3-xlib
• rofi
• unity-gtk2-module
• unity-gtk3-module
• plotinus (optional - additional menu backend for some GTK3 programs without a traditional menu)

A reference package for Debian/Ubuntu is available from:

• https://bitbucket.org/flexiondotorg/debian-packages

Compatibility

Compatibility may depend on your environment's compatability with the rofi package, which means environments using Wayland (e.g. Ubuntu 21.04) may not work (see related rofi issue).