tofi

Tofi

An extremely fast and simple dmenu / rofi replacement for wlroots-based Wayland compositors such as Sway.

The aim is to do just what I want it to as quick as possible.

When configured correctly, tofi can get on screen within a single frame.

(You may want to click the image to see it at full size).

Note that this is slightly faster than shown in previous benchmarks (with some runs under 1.5ms!), due to some string handling improvements made in version 0.8.0. Also note that the real performance is slightly better still, as the performance logging used slows down the code by roughly 10%.

As you can see, there's not a huge amount of time that could even theoretically be saved. Somewhere around 50% of the startup time is simply spent waiting, and most of the code isn't parallelisable, as many steps depend on the result of previous steps. One idea would be to daemonize tofi, skipping much of this startup. I don't want to do this, however, for two main reasons: complexity, and I think it's probably about fast enough already!