Rofi is also king in my opinion. It can do everything you need with extensions / scripts but at its core it is kept minimal with a VERY small memory footprint. Sure dmenu is even smaller but some esthetics aren't bad.

Xfce also supports really easy arbitrary launcher functionality via the whisker menu.

Setup takes just a few minutes, you start by mapping the command `xfce4-popup-whiskermenu` to super+space in the keyboard settings, to make it easy to open the Whisker Menu with its launcher prompt. This gets you the basic menu search functionality. Next it's just a matter of adding a Search Action which can include any commands or shortcut keys you want to use.

(Oh, and btw, add ` --pointer` to the shortcut above to make the menu open at your cursor. It looks more like a launcher this way.)

To add Search Actions, right-click the whisker menu icon, go to "Search Actions" and add whatever you want, for example I have `e [your sentence here]` mapped to espeak:

- Name: Say it out loud

- Pattern: e

- Command: espeak "%s" -v us-mbrola-2 -s 140 -a 200 -g 1 -p 60

(This requires the mbrola voice package in addition to espeak)

It also supports regex. Anyway, just in case this is useful to anybody as a launcher using built-ins...and I mean you could even use it to launch various different launchers. :-)

I’m still in awe that windows has had similar functionality available at a single press of the windows key, but you still can’t do basic arithmetic on it.

The launcher included in PowerToys (called Run utility[0]) does support arithmetic. Sure, it's an extra thing to install, but it's first-party at least.

[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

Most Microsoft keyboards have a dedicated calculator key, which I personally find more efficient, and you can bind it to your preferred calculator app.

I've been using ulauncher lately — https://ulauncher.io/

Though I'd like to find one that centers properly under Wayland. I'll have to dig into this list.

> Though I'd like to find one that centers properly under Wayland.

Wouldn't that require compositor integration? I was given to understand that Wayland clients can't work with absolute positioning.

There's the xdg-shell protocol to position launchers, bars or similar UI elements https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-shell

Scriptable fuzzy-finders like rofi or dmenu are really the best innovation since tab-completion IMHO. It's so easy to create good enough customized workflows with them, it really changed my way of interaction. I've even got to the point where I use per-app-menus to call external scripts for some stuff. And now I wish apps would support some level of remote-control to make them accessible for such customization. At the moment I'm limited to using shortcut-keys and window-titles. Which is ok, but also a bit brittle and slow.

Kupfer (gnome) - https://kupferlauncher.github.io

Quicksilver (macos): https://qsapp.com/

I still find myself using these and enjoy the 'wei wu wei' flow of them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d4LkTstvUL4 (skip to 5 or 11 minutes in)

IIRC Alfred supersedes Quicksilver, and I guess that's where the Albert name of the OP comes from.

https://www.alfredapp.com/

fuzzel - https://codeberg.org/dnkl/fuzzel

what about raycast?! https://www.raycast.com/

I use jumpapp[0] and find it fantastic for application switching on Manjaro/KDE.

[0] https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp.git

I've used Launchy for many years and have never really found anything that felt as good and was as fast when using.

Fun fact: dmenu was also ported to macOS. Unfortunately it doesn’t work very well yet but still, it’s pretty cool!