i3wm exec, dmenu_run, and $PATH

28 Jun 2021

Apparently, neither dmenu_run nor i3’s exec command care about paths exported via .bashrc or .bash_profile. I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to debug this issue.

Prelude

It all started a few days ago when I found i3-auto-layout, which automatically decides where each window spawns depending on the parent container’s ratio.

I liked it enough that I installed it under ~/.local/bin, added an exec_always --no-startup-id i3-auto-layout entry in the i3 config file, and then went to bed.

The Issue

The next morning, I noticed my windows spawning in the same old vertical slices, almost as though i3-auto-layout wasn’t running at all.

I began running through my PEBKAC checklist, starting with checking if it’s actually running:

$ ps aux | grep i3-auto-layout
person    145354  0.0  0.0   6408  2316 pts/9    S+   23:47   0:00 grep i3-auto-layout

Okay, so obviously it wasn’t running. But why?

I double checked $PATH to make sure that ~/.local/bin is included. And indeed it was:

$ echo $PATH
... /home/person/.local/bin ...

Next, I checked dmenu_run as well. It lists entries by alphabetic order, so i3-auto-layout should’ve been the first thing that came up. Except it didn’t:

WHERE IS IT??

At this point, I had a sneaking suspicion that neither of them were getting their $PATH values from .bashrc or .bash_profile in my home folder.

Troubleshooting

I decided to just look this one up. I found an unusually useful post on StackExchange that linked to a relevant Arch Linux forum post:

Setting $PATH in ~/.bashrc doesn’t ensure your WM/dmenu will inherint this env.
A more relevant question to ask is, “How do you login?” Usually the env exported in ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile are available in your X applications.
Launch dmenu_run as you normally do, then in dmenu, type
echo $PATH > /tmp/path
Then in a terminal, cat /tmp/path to see what that $PATH is.

Just to confirm the accuracy of the forum post, I checked the content of $PATH as seen by dmenu_run:

$ cat /tmp/path
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin/site_perl:/usr/bin/vendor_perl:/usr/bin/core_perl

Wait, is that the superuser’s $PATH value?

Solution

As much as I wanted i3-auto-layout to show up on dmenu_run, I couldn’t just go and . That’s going to open

It was ugly, but in the end, I decided to just hardcode the executable’s full path to i3-auto-layout:

exec_always --no-startup-id /home/person/.local/bin/i3-auto-layout

After restarting i3, I had my auto layout back.

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