Software Alternatives & Reviews

dmenu VS LaunchBar

Compare dmenu VS LaunchBar and see what are their differences

dmenu logo dmenu

dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, originally designed for dwm.

LaunchBar logo LaunchBar

Start with a single keyboard shortcut to access and control every aspect of your digital life. Use LaunchBar and improve your workflow now.
  • dmenu Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-27
  • LaunchBar Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-03

dmenu videos

dmenu: Your own Custom Script Menus!

More videos:

  • Review - j4-dmenu-desktop - Faster Keystroke Launcher - Linux DMENU i3
  • Review - A Simple File Manager Using Dmenu

LaunchBar videos

Launchbar - My #1 Time Saver

More videos:

  • Review - Mac Productivity: Launchbar 6 vs. Alfred 2
  • Review - Be More Productive with LaunchBar, Part 1

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to dmenu and LaunchBar)
Productivity
61 61%
39% 39
App Launcher
60 60%
40% 40
Mac
56 56%
44% 44
Windows Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare dmenu and LaunchBar

dmenu Reviews

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LaunchBar Reviews

4 Best Spotlight Alternatives to Increase Your Mac’s Functionality
LaunchBar lets you look up documents, apps, and bookmarks using short abbreviations, albeit it isn’t as fast at returning results as the other two app launchers. In addition, it has a powerful file manager, which lets you query file metadata and perform operations like copying, moving, and renaming files and folders easily.
Source: techpp.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, dmenu should be more popular than LaunchBar. It has been mentiond 22 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

dmenu mentions (22)

  • Bspwm + Sxhkd + Polybar
    For dmenu modifications go to http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/ and read about patching, or use some patched versions from github, like Luke Smiths https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/dmenu. Source: 5 months ago
  • Textual Web: TUIs for the Web
    Some features are nice to have. Give dmenu [0] a try, pipe it into other CLI utils and see how useful it can be to have drop-downs sometimes. [0] https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Kera Desktop: open-source, cross-platform, web-based desktop environment
    This is a wonderful project! I've been thinking a lot about making such a unified desktop stack for a while now; web technology has matured to the point where I think it's feasible to build a complete environment a la Smalltalk/Symbolics but with a modern feature set. Obviously this has deficiencies but like it or not the web _is_ computing for the vast majority of people and exploring/pushing its limits of user... - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • Is there an xfce equivalent to KDE's quick launch?
    I love simplicity of dmenu and it's quite powerful with some scripts. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Request for a distro based on a list of programs for a Windows user
    Everything is a fast file search tool for windows. OP can use dmrun by suckless or plocate (cli) . I don't know if there is any comparable gui available. Source: about 1 year ago
View more

LaunchBar mentions (8)

  • You're using function keys wrong
    I've been doing this for >10 years with https://manytricks.com/butler/. Works great! You can also bind snippets of text, scripts, etc. I can't overstate how important it is to have a keyboard that groups function keys into "islands" of (generally) 4 so you can touch-type them. An ergonomics consultant once observed that the source of my neck pain was that I looked at the keyboard while typing. As a touch-typist, I... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Maccy is an open source lightweight and searchable clipboard manager for macOS
    LaunchBar[0], which predates Alfred but is similar in function, also has a fantastic searchable clipboard manager. LaunchBar's manager includes a feature that I've not been able to find in any other clipboard manager: a push/pop stack. With this feature you can, for example, copy a bunch of different items from a web page on to the stack, then paste them sequentially in a web form and pop them from the stack so... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • What apps do you install on your MacBook Pro to improve performance and usability?
    LaunchBar is something I personally find a more useful and better considered tool than Alfred, though they're aimed at doing the same thing. It also comes with a great clipboard persister and manager. Every time you start doing things in LaunchBar, you can type a couple of letters to filter the list of candidates down, which means juggling a 100 item clipboard history becomes very easy to manage. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Clipboard app for regularly used text
    I use the one integrated into Launchbar. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • What is the best clipboard archiving utility for macbook?
    Launchbar will persist up to 100 clipboard items, with full-text search and access. I use it constantly. The rest of Launchbar is horrendously useful - the best of the 'accessory' tools, IMO. Source: almost 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing dmenu and LaunchBar, you can also consider the following products

Keypirinha - A lightning fast and flexible keystroke launcher for Windows. No installation required (portable).

Alfred - Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac.

Listary - Listary is a revolutionary search utility for Windows

Gnome Do - Simple, sleek, swift, smart. Do. GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present on your desktop or the web, and perform useful actions on those items. GNOME Do is inspired by Quicksilver & GNOME Launch Box.

Raycast - Fastest way to control Jira, GitHub and other web apps

Quicksilver - Quicksilver is a fast and free Mac OS X productivity application that gives you the power to control your Mac quickly and elegantly. Quicksilver learns your habits, making your everyday chores simple and efficient.