Selecting items by pressing a single unique key?

[aspiers]

I have a list of items. I want to be able to assign a unique key shortcut to each one, so that when rofi is displaying them, I can press a key and it will instantly select the corresponding item without having to press Enter or anything else. Is this possible? I couldn't find a general solution. What I did find:

-matching prefix

But that has several issues:

1. It requires putting the key shortcut at the beginning of the item.
2. It prefix-matches at the beginning of every word in every item, not just the beginning. (I found a mostly undocumented feature -no-tokenize but it turns out that disables tokenization of the input query rather than the options. E.g. run echo 'one foo\ntwo bar\nthree baz' | rofi -dmenu -matching prefix -no-tokenize and then type b and it will match the second and third options.)
3. It requires pressing Enter after selecting. I want to avoid this so that I have an environment which is as optimized as possible without unnecessary keystrokes.

-kb-select-N options

These do work but also have issues:

1. It's limited to 10 items, whereas I want to be able to use the full set of alphanumerics [a-z0-9] and even punctuation, etc.
2. It's inconvenient to set up, as you have to configure each kb-select-N option just for one menu, which means that for each menu you need:
   a. The custom script for the menu
   b. A wrapper script which calls rofi with the right config.

Suggested solution

If there's not already a way to solve this, I think it would be much easier if rofi supported a mode where shortcuts can be defined within the menu content, e.g.

echo 'one &foo\ntwo &bar\nthree ba&z' | \
    rofi -dmenu -matching hotkey

would automatically bind f, b, and z to the first, second, and third options respectively. Then pressing one of those hotkeys would instantly select that option and return.

[DaveDavenport]

A quick 'n dirty workaround that would work with current rofi:

echo -en 'f: one foo\nb: two bar\nz: three baz' |     rofi -dmenu -matching regex -no-tokenize -auto-select  -filter '^'

What does 'mostly undocumented' mean?

[aspiers]

Thanks, that's great!! I was already trying putting the shortcut at the start, and I had also just realized that -no-tokenize applies to input rather than options, but hadn't managed to combine the two ideas. I'd also completely missed -auto-select and probably wouldn't have thought of combining with -filter ^ either.

The only official docs I found were in https://davatorium.github.io/rofi/current/rofi.1/ which says:

-tokenize

Tokenize the input.

I think it would be a lot more helpful if it explained:

• what tokenization is in this context,
• what impact the option has,
• that it's on by default, and
• that switching it off requires -no-tokenize (since it's very easy to miss the -no-X technique).

[DaveDavenport]

Clarified the manpage, thanks.