I have parted with FVWM. Not that I was dissatisfied with more than 12 years of using it and organically growing its configuration. I was not.
But I was recently shown i3 which, despite not being Awesome, is indeed awesome. Particularly in the usability of its default, which I found did not require many a tweak. I was however a bit confused at first, then impressed, when I realised that the auto-generated configuration took into account my Dvorak keymap, and updated the keybindings so the keys would be the same as those on a QWERTY keyboard. That’s thoughtfullness.
The next great thing about i3 (save for $mod+Return to start a term anywhere, anytime), is dmenu. At a press of the relevant binding (equivalent to $mod+d on an 200-year-old keymap), one gets to enter a one-line entry where any command can be entered for execution, with incremental completion.
Dmenu is also nice due to its modularity. It takes a list of strings that can be completed on stdin, and outputs the typed or selected string on stdout, for consumption by whatever script called it.
I figured that it should be possible to handle URLs in a dmenu script. It is actually pretty trivial, and the friend who convinced me to take the jump also provided such a script, which would simply open the typed URL. But I wasn’t entirely satisfied, as recent years of browser usage taught me to expect URL completion. So I looked into ways of doing it.