Why is wofi recommended so much?

Lunya \ she/it@iusearchlinux.fyi to Linux@lemmy.ml – 36 points –

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.

19

I don't use wofi, but in general - what's there to maintain? It's a launcher. There are no new novel ways popping up constantly to launch applications.

Wofi ok. Rofi-Wayland great. Tofi awesome and enough for my use case.

Wofi is still working fine with wayfire. It's actually still offered on Arch as part of the "extra" repository:

% pacman -Ss wofi
extra/wofi 1.3-2 [installed]
    launcher for wlroots-based wayland compositors

To be honest, I found it more straight forward than rofi, but I could still use rofi if it worked well on wayland. I've never used tofi, and it doesn't seem like a drop-in replacement for wofi. But I guess it's worth trying. It's seems less graphical than wofi though...

Tofi is so ugly tho. Do you have any cool dotfiles to share? :D

4 month ago is not that bad for such a small project. Eww looks more active, but I don't have the patience to learn how to create a menu. Its way too DIY for me.

probably bc wofi may be in more repos n package managers afaik, seems like a popularity issue for rofi-wayland more than a more conscious decision to not recommend it

Yeah, Rofi-wayland doesn't work as well as it should. Maybe it works if you are using the default config or something similar but for me it is supposed to show at the top of the screen, dmenu-style, but it instead shows under my bar rather than over it, as it should. Bemenu, with j4-dmenu-desktop work just as well for me on Wayland, as rofi did on Xorg.