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Positioning Rofi on the monitor

In the current theme format you set these properties on the window widget.

The first, location, determines where rofi is placed on the monitor, the second what point of the rofi window connects there. This sounds complicated, but it ain't.

location setting

The location setting determines the place of the window on the monitor.

The location setting supports the following values:

  • north
  • northeast
  • northwest
  • south
  • southeast
  • southwest
  • east
  • west
  • center

This is depicted in the diagram below:

location

anchor setting

The anchor sets what point of the rofi window is placed at the specified location.

The anchor settings supports the same values as the location setting.

If you want the middle of the rofi window to be always located at the center of the monitor set both location and anchor to center.

If the rofi window resizes, its center will stay at the center. If you set the anchor to north the top of the rofi window is at the center of the monitor, and the window will grow down.

If you set the anchor and location to south, rofi is located at the bottom center and the window grows up.

Note that if you set the anchor to south and the location to north the rofi window will be placed above the monitor and might not be visible.

In another blog post we will explain how the dynamic sizing behaviour of rofi can be tweaked or disabled.

So the following theme setting will place the top of the rofi window in the center of the monitor:

window {
    location: center;
    anchor: north;
}

As depicted here, RED is the location (center of screen), GREEN is the anchor on rofi window (north):

positions

Quick hint, if you want to quickly test out changes to the theme, without editing the file, run rofi like:

rofi -show run -theme-str "window { location: center; anchor: north;}"