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

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] markstos 1 points 7 months ago

There was a time when wofi was clearly the best choice, I think some of the recommendations you found date back to that period. Since then, there have been a lot of competing projects with activity.

The one I recommend is Fuzzel, which is being actively maintained*. I compared a few here, although the post is getting dated now:

https://mark.stosberg.com/fuzzel-a-great-dmenu-and-rofi-altenrative-for-wayland/

I recommend checking out the git version of Fuzzel, which has a number of updates since the last release.

To the person who asked "What's there to maintain? It's a launcher". I subscribe to the Fuzzel issue tracker, and there is a queue of 20 or 30 features that people would like implemented. The reality is that Rofi accumulated a number of features over the years and often people are asking for more fuzzel features to implemented.

For example, one that's being considered now is native window switching. This is already possible with Fuzzel when used in combination with swayr, but it would be more convenient to have in one tool.

*Fuzzel hasn't had a release recently, but there's a been a steady stream of features and fixes being added to it that I hope do get released soon!