Dmenu alias integration with xterm!

dmenu_alias

#!/usr/bin/bash
# By: Alan Morgan
# Don't you love my obfuscated perl code?
perl -e '
sub uniq { my %seen; grep !$seen{$_}++, @_; }
$dmenu=`dmenu_path`;
@dmenu=split "\n", $dmenu;
$aliases=`bash -i -c alias`;
@aliases = $aliases =~ /^alias ([^\=]+)\=.*$/mg;
%aliases = map { $_ => 1 } @aliases;
@all_cmds = sort (uniq( @aliases, @dmenu ));
$all_cmds = join "\n", @all_cmds;
print $all_cmds' | /usr/bin/dmenu "$@" | perl -e '
sub trim { return $_[0] =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//rg; }
$aliases=`bash -i -c alias`;
@aliases = $aliases =~ /^alias ([^\=]+)\=.*$/mg;
%aliases = map { $_ => 1 } @aliases;
$cmd = "";
while (<>) { $cmd=$_; }
$cmd = trim($cmd);
if (exists $aliases{$cmd}) { $cmd="xtermcmd $cmd" }
print"$cmd";' | ${SHELL:-"/bin/sh"}

xtermcmd

#!/bin/bash
# For running commands on xterm startup.

# The newline is needed, because bash does weird things with aliases. Bash
# needs a line before the shopt command takes effect. That was a wild goose
# chase!

# http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/bash/bashref_72.html
xtermcmd() {
	xterm -e "bash --rcfile <(echo -e \"shopt -s expand_aliases; . ~/.bashrc;\n$*\")"
}

xtermcmd "$*"

So, I really wanted aliases to work with dmenu and for my aliases to pull up xterm when you run it through dmenu. I got it working after quite a few hours. There were some little quirks with xterm that I had to get by. I would have used this script, but it is way outdated and didn't work 🙁.

You can modify this gist to work with any terminal emulator. To do so, just replace the xtermcmd near the bottom of the dmenu_alias file with your command to open up a terminal emulator (with alias support from opening it up).

And to install, just make sure you put both these scripts in your path (if you aren't using xterm, then you only need the dmenu_alias file. Reply if you got questions/feed back!