What are the best Linux app launchers?

Question

34

Options
Considered

725

User
Recs.

Jul 29, 2022

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 28 OptionsWhy?

Best Linux app launchers	Price	File Size	Publisher
95 Rofi	FREE	529KiB	Dave Davenport
89 Ulauncher	-	1.9M	Aleksandr Gornostal
81 Dmenu	-	-	-
79 Albert	-	-	-
-- Docky	-	-	-

See Full List

27 Other Options Considered

Ulauncher

Top Pro

Simple

Ulauncher comes with very reasonable defaults, looks good and just works. See More

Top Con

Needs more posibilities for extensions

Currently, extensions can run only when you type their alias and <space>. There is no way to see results from multiple extensions at once. The output is also limited just to rows. See More

ArtisticAmergin's Experience

love it , once its installed . i would recommend it See More

Specs

File Size:1.9M

Publisher:Aleksandr Gornostal

System resource usage:low

License:GPL-3

See All Specs

Top Pro

Fast

Top Con

Pretty slow

Launches with a delay. See More

Southern Wolf's Experience

Absolutely fantastic launcer, great for any distro! See More

Top Pro

Supports extensions in Python

With Ulauncher you can easily add and update third party extensions. From kill process to windows switching, many of them work very well. The extension API is documented and if you know Python you can create and share your own extensions. See More

Top Con

Does not easily fit into a customized desktop without full GTK3 CSD support

DebonairGnowee's Experience

Impressive easy to install .. speeds up task launching and finding See More

Top Pro

Allows custom shortcuts

cembalista's Experience

New, Simple and Functional. Great potential and easy documentation for creating extensions. See More

Top Pro

Themeable

ULauncher supports themes and comes with a good supply on install but more can also be made. See More

PleasantRuohtta's Experience

I love this. I love the way how easy you can create your own extensions and how you can share them with people. It was the first time for me, to write something that someone else uses. Thanks ULauncher. See More

Top Pro

Actively maintained

Unlike Albert or others, it is actually being maintained. See More

RobustAlecto's Experience

It just works for the basics! Claims to do three different things, and it does those well. Can't ask for a better Un*x tool. See More

Top Pro

Supports fuzzy search

You can enter app name with a typo and Ulauncher will still be able to find it. See More

MagicalCalleis's Experience

This launcher looks AWESOME and is SUPER customizable! Perfect choice! See More

Top Pro

Good extension ecosystem

EarnestThoosa's Experience

Looks great; fast; light on resources. See More

Top Pro

Direct plugin install from GitHub

Can fork, customize, and install instantly. See More

DependableHemera's Experience

It just works! I can't live with out it! See More

Top Pro

Extensions are really easy to write by yourself

FantasticSuadela's Experience

Looks good and fast, I made a little new extension with python and put it in the public list easily. See More

Top Pro

Able to launch Kdialog, Zenity and Bash scripts

Extensions are easily created. Python script is all open to see. Not compiled like some. See More

InsightfulAdrasteia's Experience

iT WAS AWESOME See More

Top Pro

Good look

Ulauncher looks modern & can be customized with many themes. See More

SophisticatedBaduhenna's Experience

By far this is the nicest launcher for Linux ever made. I came from MacOS and I find Ulauncher a great alternative for Spotlight. See More

ReverentAsterion's Experience

Nice app to launch apps and have many estensions See More

Diego Gramajo's Experience

Slick, cool, easy to use and customize. See More

InterestingAoGuang's Experience

Looks pretty, super fast, simple to set up See More

MellowPriapus's Experience

Elegant See More

ImmaculateKresnik's Experience

It is simple to install and the extensions I have installed have worked really well. So far Ulauncher has has enabled me to find whatever I have been looking for very quickly. I like being able to search my search engine of choice as well as YouTube from my desktop. (I really dislike going to the YouTube website.) I also added a dictionary extension because I tend to have difficulty remembering how to spell many English words (for example why is there a 'g' and an 'h' in the word night?) Yes, I could open a dictionary application or go to a dictionary website to determine how to spell a word, but popping my attempt to spell a word with silent letters into Ulauncher and almost immediately being show the correct spelling seems so much quicker to me. See More

FunnyGefjun's Experience

Quick, easy and beautiful app launcher. See More

AmbitiousElpis's Experience

Good selection of extensions. Simple, and solid. See More

CourageousKisin's Experience

Very clean and beautiful, highly customizable with many useful plugins. See More

DreamerIapetus's Experience

Fast and clean. See More

ReceptiveChronos's Experience

Admirably simple, looks good and works well. See More

AuthenticMammetun's Experience

Easy to use keyboard shortcuts See More

Meta's Experience

Would definitely recommend for the extensions, it's nice to have everything in one bar. I hope a lighter UI will come in the future. See More

OrganizedNemain's Experience

Tried Albert, Zazu, and a few others. ULauncher is simple, fast, and does exactly what I need. See More

See All

Dmenu

Top Pro

Keyboard-centric

you don't need a mouse to use it See More

xero harrison's Experience

fast, lightweight, extensible/scriptable, minimal See More

Specs

System resource usage:Low

Top Pro

Fast / low resource consumption

It doesn't run in the background, use up much RAM, or lag. See More

Top Pro

Blazing fast

Top Pro

Intergrates well with i3 and dwm

(you basically have to do zero configuration if you are using i3 or dwm) See More

Top Pro

Suckless

Focus on simplicity, clarity, and frugality. See More

Top Pro

Visually customizable

Colors, prompt, location, size. See More

Top Pro

Extensible / Scriptable

You can easily script around it and do way more than just launch applications. See More

Top Pro

Highly usable in scripting, piping.

Programmed in smart way: less code is more usability and solid. See More

See All

Albert

Top Pro

Blazingly fast and lightweight

Written in C++. See More

Top Con

High RAM usage / memory leak

ConfidentMinerva's Experience

Works perfectly. Really fast and pretty! See More

Top Pro

Support for plugins

Top Con

Keyboard navigation is not customizeable

UpbeatKupala's Experience

Functionality of KRunner with aesthetics of Ulauncher, yes please! Much better than Ulauncher, since you don't have to use keywords. See More

Top Pro

Visual appearance customizable

Comes with predefinded themes. Customizable with QSS (a CSS dialect) See More

Top Con

Plugins are centrally managed

Albert doesn't have an ecosystem of third party plugins like for example Alfred and Ulauncher does. All the plugins are maintained in the git repositories here and here. See More

PrincipledTohil's Experience

The launcher itself is really fantastic, but over several installs & configuration tweaks - Albert always ended up having memory leak issues. At one point, it was using upwards of 7Gb of RAM - which is about 6.95Gb too high. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Licensed under GPL See More

Top Con

Settings are complex

Albert comes with lot of options. It includes two different theming engines hand hence two sets of themes. It has two different plugin systems (for Python or C++). You also get all the plugins and their settings when you install it, since they're all maintained in the same repo. See More

David Aslan French's Experience

Beautiful, simple, powerful. Period. See More

Top Pro

Dictionary lookup plugin

Through GoldenDict See More

Top Pro

Scriptable/Functionality customizable

External programs can be used to provide result items See More

Top Pro

Plugins doesn't require keywords

Other launchers often require a keyword to use a plugin. For example "conv 4ft to m". In Albert plugins doesn't need this, so there's less to type. See More

See All

Docky

Top Pro

Drag and drop apps to the dock

Users can easily drag and drop apps to the dock for easy launching. Any app that is added will stay on the dock until removed manually. This makes for a great way to have all of ones most used apps in one place. See More

Top Con

Removing Docky icon is not as easy as it should be

gconf editor is required in order to remove the Docky icon from the dock, which seems unnecessary as the setting exists, it should be in the app settings instead of hidden away in gconf. See More

Top Pro

Many themes

There are several themes installed with the dock by default that aare easily switched in the settings. What is even better is that there are many themes available online for download as well. With the best part being thatt he themes are simple .svg files that are easily editable in Inkscape to customize to how one wants. See More

Top Pro

Highly Customisable.

Top Pro

Plugin Docklets

Docky provides simple applications that run inside of the dock such as a clock, weather forecaster and CPU monitor. These provide an easy way to see information without having to open up separate apps. See More

Top Pro

Panel mode

For those that do not like the OSX dock look there is also a panel mode included that pushed the apps to the left side of the panel and elongates the dock to fill the entire bottom of the screen, just as a regular OS panel would. See More

See All

Plank

Top Pro

Solid and lightweight

Top Con

No right click menu for some apps outside of elementary OS

Other file explorers and terminals (those not found in the default elementary OS) do not have any right click menus for the dock meaning it is impossible to launch multiple windows for certain file explorers or terminals. See More

Top Pro

Simple and minimal

Plank is a good choice for those looking for something simple that just does its job well. There is no UI for options built in to the dock as to change anything those options will have to be accessed through a text file. See More

Top Con

No UI for settings

Al settings will have to be changed in a text file located in /.config/plank/dock1/settings. See More

Top Pro

Third party themer available

An additional third party app has been developed that allows theming the dock without the use of any extra resources. This is great for those that are not using elementary OS and the elementary tweaks extra. See More

Top Con

Poor workplace awareness (cycling windows)

When configured to only show apps on current workspace, cycling an app open on multiple workspaces will switch workspace focus, update the dock and often leave you to cycle another app. See More

See All

Krunner

Top Pro

Fast

As it is written in Qt QtQuick using QML. See More

Top Con

There are few plugins/"runners", and some do not work as they are old

Thangaraj J's Experience

Works well. Maybe the UI could do with a spruce up, but it's very functional and fast which is the most important thing. See More

Specs

File Size:1.4MiB

Publisher:KDE

System resource usage:Low

Top Pro

Opens folders/files also

Just by typing name of file or folder, it will give recommendations See More

DependableCihuacoatl's Experience

Really fast and does system wide search See More

Top Pro

Can be used to open websites

By just typing an URL into the text box users can have the site open in their default launcher. See More

ArtisticPhraPhrom's Experience

Simply Awesome. Just Perfect !!! See More

Top Pro

Extensible with plugins

Krunner can be extended with the use of "runners" which are essentially plugins for the app launcher to allow for extra functions. See More

Peter J. Mello's Experience

After years of using KDE Plasma, it's between this and Klipper for me as to the most excellent reasons never to use another desktop environment. Launch an app, find a file, open a browser to a URL, get a Unicode character you don't know the code for, perform simple arithmetic, show me synonyms and antonyms for any word, tell me what an acronym stands for... Krunner just says, "You got it, boss." Hells to the yes. I'll take three, thank you. (If the rumours are true about the next major version adding..."pleasuring techniques"...to the mix, you all can kiss me goodbye once and for all. Not kidding even a little.) See More

Top Pro

Great integration with Plasma, developed by KDE

Top Pro

Lots of handy features

Such as a fully featured calculator, file opening, browser functions, currency conversion, date/time functions, etc. See More

Top Pro

I'm able to find open tabs from browsers with KRunner which is very nice

Even supports edge browser. See More

See All

DockbarX

Top Pro

Great plugin to help blend in to XFCE4 panel

DockbarX has an available plugin called "DockBarX Xfce4 Panel plugin" that allows DockbarX to blend in seamlessly with the XFCE4 panel, which is great for XFCE users due to the limited options of the default panel. See More

Top Con

Not actively updated

Less than a dozen updates since 2014: https://github.com/M7S/dockbarx/commits/master See More

Top Pro

Easily customized

DockbarX has inbuilt settings that allow the user to easily customize the look of the dock, from changing the text color to the background color. See More

Top Pro

Easily the best Win 7 taskbar functionality

If you want a combined launcher/manager, a la Win 7, this is it. See More

See All

Synapse

Top Pro

Rock solid

Synapse is pretty rock solid. Works as expected and launches applications fast. See More

Top Con

Unable to search whole system

Due to Zeitgeist being used the search is not as robust as if it were using Tracker. Of course using Tracker has its own downside like battery drain, so currently there is no "best" solution. See More

Ajay Kumar Rawani's Experience

Awesome ! See More

Top Pro

Can run commands just as a terminal would

Users can run commands such as sudo apt-get update from within Synapse, making for a convenient way to open or run items/commands. See More

Top Con

Bound to control+space

Due to this it interferes with common IDE layouts for recommendations. Modifying hotkeys file doesn't adjust this. See More

Top Pro

Zeitgeist powered

Synapse searches the Zeitgeist log, which tends to be a pretty quick way to do searches over other app launchers. See More

Top Pro

Includes a Zeal plugin

Includes a Zeal plugin to make searching faster. See More

See All

Cerebro

Top Con

Development is not very active

Top Pro

Extensible

List of plugins at https://github.com/lubien/awesome-cerebro#plugins See More

David Aslan French's Experience

Really great presentation AND cross platform which is great for someone who uses Windows for work but development does not seem to be very active, and the number of plugins pales in comparison to Wox which is what I use on my windows machine. If it were as good as Wox then it's cross platform would be make it shine but there are loads of launchers on linux already and cerebro doesn't add anything else particularly special. See More

Top Con

Plugin selection is small

Top Pro

Cross platform is a HUGE plus

CrediblePhaenon's Experience

Great launcher See More

Top Con

No file system search

Top Pro

Clean visual design

Top Pro

Measurement conversion and calculator

Top Pro

Navigate file system with previews

Top Pro

Closest approximate to look/feel of macOS's Spotlight on Linux

See All

Launchy

Top Con

Abandoned

Launchy was last updated in 2010. See More

Top Pro

.deb files available for Debian based distros

For those using Debian based distros Launchy is very easy to install as their website has 32 and 64bit .deb files available. For all other diistros Launchy will have to be compiled from source. See More

Top Con

Small selection of plugins

The official plugin page on Launchy's homepage hosts just 11 plugins. See More

Top Pro

Easily themed with many available on the web

Launchy can be easily themedby placing themes into the Launchy theme folder and then selecting that theme from within the apps settings. There are also many user created themes available which is great for those that want their launcher to match the rest of their OS's theme. See More

See All

Cairo-Dock

Top Con

No updates since 2016

Certainly no PPAs for modern releases of Ubuntu. See More

Top Pro

Easy to tweak and make your own themes

Drag and drop, change icons, use effects, etc. It's fun to play with. It's not a basic dock program and the GUI is good. See More

Top Con

Poor/No system theme or icon integration

Docks use their own theme, own theme colors, icons, layout's and theme engines. See More

Top Pro

Cairo-Dock session

Users can choose to launch a stand alone Cairo-Dock session where the dock also serves as a taskbar where all apps are launchable such as in any other DE session. There is a composited version and one without. See More

Top Con

Hard/Underwhelming to configure

Cairo dock proposes a feature rich tool, tweakable to any degree. The configuration menus are at times inappropriate, shallow and uninteresting, complex to navigate, and prefab-centric. Rarely offering a satisfying preset, and always unsatisfying to tweak. See More

Top Pro

Popular and usually found and installed from a distros repo

Due to the popularity and how long Cairo-Dock has been around it is more often than not found in a distros repos, which is very convenient to get the app installed. See More

Top Con

Can be heavy on resources for weaker systems

Cairo-Dock is more on the heavy side when compared to other docks, which is something to keep in mind for those that are on low resource systems. See More

Top Pro

Easily themed

Cairo-Dock has built in settings to install and use themes for the dock and icons. Definitely more robust in this are than most other docks available for Linux. See More

See All

ueli

Top Pro

Free and Open Source

Hain

Top Con

Linux and Mac support still require you to build the electron project from source but really isn't so hard

Top Pro

Super easy plugin integration using NPM

David Aslan French's Experience

One of the most full featured and well designed cross platform application launchers. There are many good launchers on Windows, Linux, and Mac but there are few that are cross platform, AND actively being developed. Hain is from the start very full featured, has a great integration with NPM for installing plugins, and uses themes which are fully compatible with Albert. I highly highly recommend it. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Top Pro

Compatible with Albert theme system

Top Pro

Actively developed

Top Pro

Cross platform

See All

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Rofi

Top Pro

Customisable

Top Con

One of the most poorly documented launchers for new users

Challenge: Install Rofi and google how to actually start or use it. Sure, there's plenty of Arch users screaming about dmenu, showing off editing of config files, integrating it with i3 or this or that, but how do we actually: 1) Start it. 2) Use it. Rofi seemed intriguing, because it was ranked #1 on slant, but it may be better to use a third party dock in Xfce, because there's simply no resource on how to use Rofi for a complete newbie. See More

Albin Larsson's Experience

Rofi is a launcher for tinkerers and power users who use tiling window managers or their own custom desktop environments, are really into minimizing resource usage and/or want to be in full control for other reasons, but for users that want a good clean default experience it's not a great option. Rofi's biggest strength is probably the amount of customization, and the performance (rendering huge lists without slowing down your computer). It does not run in the background, which is really nice because it means zero resource usage when you're not using it, but it does make the launch less snappy compared to launchers that do run in the background. The biggest weakness is that you need to spend a lot of time to read the man page, github, etc to understand how to customize it, and even though I spent hours doing that I find it's just not possible to get it to behave the way I want. I recommend it if you're a tinkerer or don't like launchers like Ulauncher and Albert, but if you do like these launchers and just want something more performant, then you probably won't be quite as happy using Rofi. Full disclosure: I'm a Ulauncher maintainer, but I really wanted to be fair to Rofi and gave it much more time than an average user would have, and I hope Rofi continues to improve :) See More

Specs

File Size:529KiB

Publisher:Dave Davenport

System resource usage:Low

Top Pro

Can run commands

e.g.: <code>run: st toxic</code> Runs a tox client in the terminal emulator "st". <code>run: maim ~/Images/screenshots</code> take a screenshot with "maim" and save it to given location. See More

Top Con

Issues when Caps Lock is active

When typing with Caps Lock activated, it's impossible to use Backspace. Rofi eventually freezes in this scenario. See More

NobleOshosi's Experience

Less bloated See More

Top Pro

Simple

Top Con

Issues on Wayland

If you use Wayland, then Rofi may fail to grab keypresses or inputs, or may fail altogether. Works fine if you switch to X11. See More

ChattyNyamiNyami's Experience

It uses about 10-20MB RAM when fully customized and with about 1000 items to select, which is great. See More

Top Pro

Minimalist design, yet can use customizable themes

Also it's easy to make use of your own "plugin" (scripts). See More

Top Con

Lacks keywords to switch between modes

You can switch between modes with ctrl+tab by default, but if you have a lot of modes this is slow. See More

David Aslan French's Experience

Rofi is powerful but if you're looking for a Launcher like Alfred, which is clean and simple looking, with very little text, then rofi is not for you. Everything is a whole lot more compressed and claustrophobic feeling. See More

Top Pro

Great keybindings

They seem to be emacs based. See More

Top Con

Lacks a default "blank slate" launch behavior

Unlike Ulauncher, Albert and similar launcher there's no generic "enable everything" launch behavior. You can configure Rofi to do almost this, but it's whitelist based, so you'd have to reconfigure it if you install or uninstall a plugin, and Rofi has to know if the plugin should be part of the combi mode or treated as an isolated mode. See More

Top Pro

Resource efficient

Top Con

Lacks conventions for plugins

For example the calc mode/plugin will output the result to stdout by default, while the emoji mode/plugin will add it to the clipboard, and there's no good way for plugins to add additional config option. The plugins can check your CLI arguments, but you can't put those in your config instead to make them persist in a convenient manner, so you have to pass them as arguments every time, and multiple plugins could implement the same cli argument to mean different things. See More

Top Pro

Case insensitive

Instead of having to worry about case sensitive characters, you can use caps or lowercase wherever you please without causing any issues. See More

Top Pro

Clipboard history extension

Greenclip adds clipboard manager functionality. See More

Top Pro

Greatly maintained

Top Pro

No resource usage when you're not using it

Other launchers often run in the background to be prepared for showing the launcher. Rofi doesn't do this. On the negative side this means it can launch slower (depending on your environment and setrtings). See More

Top Pro

Easily switch windows without mouse

See All

The Best 1 of 28 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for Rofi

My Recommendation for Rofi

Customisable

One of the most poorly documented launchers for new users

Can run commands

Issues when Caps Lock is active

Simple

Issues on Wayland

Minimalist design, yet can use customizable themes

Lacks keywords to switch between modes

Great keybindings

Lacks a default "blank slate" launch behavior

Resource efficient

Lacks conventions for plugins

Case insensitive

Clipboard history extension

Greatly maintained

No resource usage when you're not using it

Easily switch windows without mouse

27 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Ulauncher

My Recommendation for Ulauncher

Simple

Needs more posibilities for extensions

Fast

Pretty slow

Supports extensions in Python

Does not easily fit into a customized desktop without full GTK3 CSD support

Allows custom shortcuts

Themeable

Actively maintained

Supports fuzzy search

Good extension ecosystem

Direct plugin install from GitHub

Extensions are really easy to write by yourself

Able to launch Kdialog, Zenity and Bash scripts

Good look

My Recommendation for Dmenu

My Recommendation for Dmenu

Keyboard-centric

Fast / low resource consumption

Blazing fast

Intergrates well with i3 and dwm

Suckless

Visually customizable

Extensible / Scriptable

Highly usable in scripting, piping.

My Recommendation for Albert

My Recommendation for Albert

Blazingly fast and lightweight

High RAM usage / memory leak

Support for plugins

Keyboard navigation is not customizeable

Visual appearance customizable

Plugins are centrally managed

Free and open source

Settings are complex

Dictionary lookup plugin

Scriptable/Functionality customizable

Plugins doesn't require keywords

My Recommendation for Docky

My Recommendation for Docky

Drag and drop apps to the dock

Removing Docky icon is not as easy as it should be

Many themes

Highly Customisable.

Plugin Docklets

Panel mode

My Recommendation for Xfce Whisker Menu

My Recommendation for Xfce Whisker Menu

The most simple and convenient app launcher on my experience

Will not support file search

Built into Xfce desktop environment

My Recommendation for Plank

My Recommendation for Plank

Solid and lightweight

No right click menu for some apps outside of elementary OS

Simple and minimal

No UI for settings