dmenu_desktop lists desktop applications installed on the system, following
a small subset of the XDG Desktop Menu Specification. It is
intended to use this command together with a dynamic menu, such as dmenu.
The selected application can be run by writing its name to the standard input
of dmenu_desktop -e.
dmenu_desktop is just a (hopefully portable) shell script, so nothing has to be compiled. To install it on the system, run
# make install
The default directory prefix is /usr/local. Set PREFIX to change it.
The canonical invocation to select and run an application with the help of dmenu is
dmenu_desktop | dmenu -i | dmenu_desktop -e
You can bind this command to a hotkey in your window manager, or use a dedicated daemon like sxhkd.
See the manual page for more details.