Is there a shell-independent HUD-like menu search tool for Xfce/GNOME/Cinnamon?

The Ubuntu Heads-Up Display (HUD) - you love it or you hate it. Personally I rather like a classic desktop, so I use Xfce or GNOME-fork Cinnamon, and I'd like to keep those menu's where they are.

But the HUD is pretty awesome when your menus are complex and you forgot where an option sits. This makes that search trick very interesting.

I know the HUD is Unity specific. I am looking for a HUD-like tool to complement the menu in shells other than Unity.

There is Appmenu Runner for KDE that does this. There is also appmenu-qt for KDE.

Problem with the above is that it uses KDE libs, and it only works for KDE apps.

This is Linux, there aught to be something like this for GNOME/GTK apps, right?

Looking for any tool that can search the menus. I already use(d) Synapse, Kupfer and GNOME Do, but those are simply app-launchers (with some tricks). Something like that would suffice if only they included searching the menus for the currently focused application.

The HUD allows users to activate menu items by typing part of the name. It uses a fuzzy search algorithm that will highlight partial matches. It can match menu items that are multiple layers deep in an application's menu hierarchy. The feature, which replaces traditional menu accelerators, is activated by pressing the alt key.

Similar questions:

• Is there a way to search a menu bar in Debian? - Unix.StackExchange
• How can I access menu bar items alike hud (unity)? - Unix.StackExchange
• HUD in other window managers (especially xmonad) - AskUbuntu

Solution 1:

I prefer Synapse over Gnome-Do.

It seems that there is some discussion about bringing this feature to Synapse.

Solution 2:

There's qmenu_hud: https://github.com/tetzank/qmenu_hud

It just retrieves the menu entries over dbus and displays them in dmenu.

You still have to get your applications, or rather the toolkit they are using, to export their menu entries to dbus. This is easily done with appmenu-qt for KDE and Qt applications. I'm not sure but i think you need a patched version of gtk to get appmenu enabled there. I guess Ubuntu ships patched gtk packages by default for Unity.