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 <Ctrl><Alt>space keyboard shortcut by default.

Gsettings

mate-hud.py reads one gsettings keys:

• org.mate.hud: shortcut (Default: Alt_L)

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 Tweak will soon add the functionality the endable/disable mate-hud.

Manual Setup

• The vala-panel-appmenu applet for MATE 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-setproctitle
• python3-xlib
• rofi
• unity-gtk2-module
• unity-gtk3-module

A reference package for Debian/Ubuntu is available from:

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