On my system I've xmobar and dmenu working. After installing Slackware-14 I've forgotten to build dmenu. Then I could not launch programs from xmonad. Then I realized that dmenu was the program which launches the programs.

I don't really know how I've configured dmenu. I've used dwm before I switched to xmonad, and dwm is configured with a config.h file and then recompiled, I don't know exactly, but it can be that I have a configuration of dmenu from when I was using dwm.

Could you please exactly describe what doesn't work on your system? In your first post you wrote that also xmonad didn't work, but now when only dmenu doesn't work, what happens?

Markus

it works now! I am not sure why though. I killed all instances of conky and dzen2. It's still black background, but it works charmingly just like the good old days.

That's nice, what did you do to make it working?

Markus

No, Xmonad worked fine. It was that you know how you type "fir" in dmenu and it completes it with "firefox", then you can hit enter to launch firefox. Typing "fir" did nothing at all. I had to manually type "firefox" without any automated completion.

I dont know. I ran sbopkg package updates again and tried installing some more. A lot of updates didnt go through like ffmpeg failed to update. I updated some libsof package and other libs, and also killed all running instances of dzen2 loghook and started xmobar. Something fixed it.

Well, if you've installed the new built package for dmenu and did not restart xmonad, you had still the old binary of dmenu running, maybe this was fixed in the moment you restarted the X-server.

Markus

I dont think so, as I restarted my entire computer after installing dmenu again, but it failed to help. I believe some lib package that the dmenu completion relied on was out of date, and I hadnt sorted out the update of my packages after upgrading to Slackware 14. Someone who understands what causes dmenu's completion feature would know.