No mater which GNU/Linux distro I’m using, I always use the same way to access my applications. A launcher.

For several months I used ULauncher, a python based launcher. A launcher is a graphical utility that allows you to quickly open any app of your system.

You can use the same launcher to do quick math operations.

Later I switched to Rofi. Which is pretty similar but allows to create launcher of any type of lists.

So I have a custom list to reduce the brightness of the monitors.

And another to launch custom actions in a time tracking software.

How does this work?

You will need a list of commands in a CSV file. For example this is my config for the monitor brightness:

Power On,xrandr --output DP1 --auto && xrandr --output DP2 --auto --right-of DP1
Power Off,xrandr --output DP1 --off && xrandr --output DP2 --off
100%,xrandr --output DP1 --brightness 1.0 && xrandr --output DP2 --brightness 1.0
 90%,xrandr --output DP1 --brightness 0.9 && xrandr --output DP2 --brightness 0.9
 80%,xrandr --output DP1 --brightness 0.8 && xrandr --output DP2 --brightness 0.8
 70%,xrandr --output DP1 --brightness 0.7 && xrandr --output DP2 --brightness 0.7

Then Use the script to load this CSV with Rofi:

#!/bin/bash

WORKINGDIR="$HOME/.config/rofi/"
MAP="$WORKINGDIR/brigthness.csv"

cat "$MAP" \
    | cut -d ',' -f 1 \
    | rofi -dmenu -p "Util " \
    | head -n 1 \
    | xargs -i --no-run-if-empty grep "{}" "$MAP" \
    | cut -d ',' -f 2 \
    | head -n 1 \
    | xargs -i --no-run-if-empty /bin/bash -c "{}"

exit 0

This was taken from: rofi as a launcher for arbitrary shell scripts