tofi-drun is missing correctly configured .desktop files

[jsimonrichard]

TL;DR: tofi-drun is missing applications that fuzzel displays.

If I had to guess, I would say this bug is related to that fact that I'm using a non-standard system from the XDG point-of-view; I'm running NixOS with Home Manager.

The missing desktop files are located in /etc/profiles/per-user/jsimonrichard/share/applications, and the parent directory of that folder is in XDG_DATA_DIRS. If you're familiar with NixOS and want to take a look at my config, you can: https://github.com/jsimonrichard/nix-config. But it's very much a work in progress. What's strange is that tofi-drun displays some of the applications in that directory; I suppose those working desktop files could be duplicated somewhere else, but if they are I can't find them. They're not in any of the directories listed in XDG_DATA_DIRS.

[Cowboylaserkittenjetshark]

I just ran into what seems like the same issue. I fixed it by deleting the cache files mentioned here. It seemed like these got regenerated as needed on my Arch system, I'm not sure what NixOS is/isn't doing to cause them not to be.

[carschandler]

I am also facing this issue on Nix. The file has an outdated list of my actual desktop entries and is not "regenerating as needed." Mine correctly pulls from $XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications, but just isn't refreshing the file. Manually deleting the tofi-drun file does cause it to be regenerated successfully.

[philj56]

Hey, thanks for the report and sorry for the long delay.

Tofi indeed caches a list of found .desktop files in "$XDG_CACHE_HOME/tofi-drun". I'm not sure what exactly would cause the problem, but as the saying goes, there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. I try to check the validity of the cache without doing too much work by checking the modified time of the directories in your application paths:

https://github.com/philj56/tofi/blob/b32c9954d3da430392575e9e637a2d8d114e34d0/src/drun.c#L246C1-L259C3

This apparently isn't 100% reliable, but startup speed is my main concern with tofi. I might try to have a look into nix at some point, to see if this is a frequent issue there, but yeah as an interim solution deleting the cache will force it to be regenerated and should fix any issues.

[Pamplemousse]

For home-manager users out there, a solution is to delete the cache on each configuration activation:

home.activation = {
  # https://github.com/philj56/tofi/issues/115#issuecomment-1701748297
  regenerateTofiCache = lib.hm.dag.entryAfter [ "writeBoundary" ] ''
    tofi_cache=${config.xdg.cacheHome}/tofi-drun
    [[ -f "$tofi_cache" ]] && rm "$tofi_cache"
  '';
};