Aerofi

Rofi for macOS: GPU-accelerated & fully scriptable

Productivity

GitHub

Apple

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Hi producthunt, I built aerofi: a native macOS launcher and script engine that tries to bridge rofi/dmenu's Unix philosophy with the polish people expect from a modern macOS app. Background: I use a tiling window manager (AeroSpace) and kept missing rofi from my Linux days — fast, fully scriptable, no SDK, just stdin/stdout. Raycast and Alfred are good tools but felt heavier than I wanted, and closed off if you want deep scripting or theming control. Three things it's built around: 1. Plug & play scripting — your script just prints structured text to stdout, no SDK, no JSON schema to learn. aerofi turns it into a live, filterable list. There's a two-way IPC mode (stdin/stdout, rofi-style) for multi-step interactive flows — pick category, pick item, confirm, act — where the script process stays alive across steps instead of relaunching per menu like classic rofi does. 2. Semantic theming instead of CSS/RASI — scripts don't know about pixels; they just declare a preset (e.g. list vs full-window view), and your TOML theme controls how the window actually looks and resizes for that mode. Layout is a declarative widget tree (box/text/icon/button/spacer), so you can build custom header/footer bars without touching Rust code. 3. Raycast script compatibility as a bonus, not the core pitch — existing @raycast.* script commands work as-is if you have some lying around, but the native format is @aerofi.* and doesn't require Raycast's ecosystem at all. Also: native C ABI plugins (.dylib) in Rust/C/C++/Swift if you want compiled extensions instead of shell scripts. Honest numbers: real memory sits around 40-55MB in normal use (macOS AppKit/Metal framework overhead accounts for a good chunk of that, outside what I can control from userspace), dropping under macOS's own memory compression when backgrounded. That's still meaningfully lighter than Electron-based alternatives, but I'd rather give an honest range than a single cherry-picked number. Open source (MIT), Homebrew-installable, actively developed. GitHub: https://github.com/frostymur/aerofi Happy to talk about the GPUI/AppKit integration, the two-way script protocol, or the theming architecture — ask away.