cant interact with rofi with keyboard

[CaptainMirage]

so i installed rofi and did all the setup.
whenever i try to actually use it, it just doesnt work, i run rofi -show drun and it opens it up just fine, but i cannot interact with it with my keyboard, the only way i can do anything is by my mouse cursor
i tried many things, running it with env vars, flags, nothing worked, i looked to see maybe its cuz im using wayland and it doesnt support it but the main page does say it supports after 2025 and i see wayland commits so i doubt its that, whats the problem?

i tried to look for some error or smth but it doesnt seem to throw any errors either

ahem.mp4

in the last part i start typing and it doesnt work, its not that clear

OS: EndeavourOS Linux x86_64
Kernel: 6.15.9-arch1-1.1-g14
Shell: zsh 5.9
DE: GNOME 48.4
WM: Mutter
Terminal: BlackBox
Rofi Version: 1.7.9.1-dirty

[CaptainMirage]

i thought it might be the fact that i installed it with pacman and the rofi package instead of rofi-wayland, but that just says Rofi on wayland requires support for the layer shell protocol which i feel like means rofi just doesnt support GNOME

[DaveDavenport]

1.7.9.1 does not support wayland.. the wayland support in mainstream has not been released yet.
See the documentation (1.7.9) :

That said, gnome (on wayland) does not implement the correct standard, and will not work well with rofi. There is very little we can do about that,.
Please get gnome to implement this if you want things to work well. Its not that we do not support gnome, it is gnome lacking a way for us to work well.

[CaptainMirage]

an okay thank you sir, i keep hearing about wofi which they say is just rofi that plays well with GNOME, ill see to that, good day

[DaveDavenport]

To the best of my knowledge, and confirmed by the manpage from wofi, it is also designed to use the layer-shell-protocol:

wofi is a rofi inspired menu program for wlroots compositors such as sway. It is intended to be highly customizable and flexible with the help of CSS styling and a dmenu mode that allows for endless scriptability. Wofi can be run cacheless in dmenu mode automatically by invoking it as dmenu with symlink.

Wofi was designed specifically for wlroots and makes use of the wlr-layer-shell protocol. If your compositor does not support this protocol or if you are in a non-wayland environment then wofi must be run with --normal-window or it will crash. If you wish to run wofi this way you can also place normal_window=true in your config file to avoid specifying the option on the command line.

So it will probably work-ish if you use --normal-window, hopefully this works out for you.

[DaveDavenport]

This might also be useful if you need the 'dmenu' functionality: https://github.com/carnager/gnome-extension-dmenu

Made by @carnager