Krunner in KDE Plasma. Fast, customisable and reliable.

If you’re on Wayland, fuzzel just keeps getting better each release.

bemenu. Type stuff in popup, press enter, no confettis thrown on your face.

I use dmenu_run because it’s ridiculously minimal, has zero dependencies, is very fast, and fits with the i3 aesthetic well.

I’ve been using ULauncher for a while and I’m quite happy with it, it has plugin support too.

I use rofi as my app launcher and more. I’ve share my old script here.

I have now extended this script to support the following:

• execute a command if the input text belongs to /bin or /usr/local/bin
• do some basic maths (using menu-calc)
• open url in my web browser if the input text starts starts with http(s) or ends with .xxx (where x is any letter)
• translate the input text in English/French using the deepl website if the input text starts with dpen/dpfr
• search the input text with searx (if all the above failed)
• manage my web bookmarks (using buku)
• manage my clipboard (using copyq)
• manage my passwords and autofill fields (using pass)
• manage bluetooth devices
• manage audio sinks and sources
• manage my wifi and vpn
• manage my tmux sessions

Krunner is great.

if you come from Windows, liked the 10 start menu, and you want to use KDE, there’s a pretty similar launcher you can use: https://store.kde.org/p/2142716

it does not have collapsible groups and live tiles, but otherwise it’s pretty good I think

I like rofi because of how many different modes people have made for it, e.g. rofi-calc, and the customisability is great too. Unfortunately it can be slow to start, but if speed is of utmost importance to you and you’re on Wayland, you might want to look into tofi

I wish raycast was available!

Very comfortable with Rofi. It’s especially nice in a window manager as it also works as a switcher or shortcut to your open programs.

I ended up coding my own.

Lots of stuff I’d want in an applications launcher on hyperland. I’d need it to have all the functions of the important system indicators and essentially take the role of the top panel in gnome.

Big fan of bash. Pretty sure it’s already installed for you.

I’m fine with Rofi. I’ve used xfce4-appfinder also, it’s less minimal, not configurable (good graphical defaults, might be what you want).

So you’re using Hyprland WM… I’m assuming to have a minimalistic Window Manager… But you want an app launcher.

No offense, but FFS just use a DE at that point. You’re just creating a DE with extra steps. KDE is nice and fairly lightweight.