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.

    • Lunya \ she/itOP
      0•9 months ago

      I put that there to make clear that I don’t care at all if software I use (important or not) isn’t maintained.

    • Strit
      -9•9 months ago

      Correct. The OS will still function for a long while, because it provides all the basic stuff it needs. Wofi, on the other hand, could stop working for people tomorrow, because a dependency updated and Wofi has not been updated to support a new syntax or API.

      • @[email protected]
        10•9 months ago

        Yes and no: an unmaintained android will have trouble running newer apps due to older versions of SDK, and you pretty much can’t do anything about it (AFAIK), but older software can be nixed/flatpaked or even statically compiled/appimaged (and we can pretty much expect no trouble on the kernel side due to their “not breaking userspace” mantra)

        • Strit
          3•9 months ago

          True, but when the android SDK gets to old, it’s been years since it was last released. Most apps these days still support Android 6. A thing depending on wlroots, will likely break on the next wlroots update. I do get your point though. Anything that is unmaintained is at risc of breaking at any point.

  • IllecorsEnglish
    24•9 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      2•9 months ago

      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…

    • @[email protected]English
      1•9 months ago

      Does Rofi-Wayland support custom css the same way wofi does? If so I’ll gladly switch, I really appreciate the ease of customizing wofi.

    • @pathief
      1•9 months ago

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

  • @[email protected]
    7•9 months ago

    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.

  • max
    3•9 months ago

    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

  • @[email protected]
    3•9 months ago

    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.

  • thejevans
    3•9 months ago

    I’ve just been using fzf with a floating terminal window, and it’s been great. I don’t understand the need for rofi/wofi/dmenu.

  • @markstos
    1•5 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!