Next Boot Selector

A DankMaterialShell plugin that lets you pick which EFI boot entry to load on the next reboot, straight from the bar or Control Center. Wraps efibootmgr --bootnext under the hood.

Bar pill popout	Control Center widget

Features

• Bar pill — single restart_alt icon, tints primary when a BootNext is pending
• Control Center widget — compound pill showing the pending target, with a scrollable picker detail
• Scrollable entry list — handles long EFI tables without hiding the action buttons
• Filter — hides PXE / CD-DVD / Removable / Network entries by default, regex is configurable
• Reactive state — picking an entry from the detail updates both the CC pill and bar pill instantly, shared across all plugin instances via PluginService.setGlobalVar
• No polkit agent required — shells out to sudo -n so it fails fast if the sudoers rule is missing, instead of hanging on an invisible password prompt

Requirements

• DankMaterialShell (dms-shell) ≥ 0.1.0
• efibootmgr on $PATH
• sudo with a NOPASSWD rule for the two commands the plugin invokes (see below)
• A UEFI system — BIOS / CSM-only machines have nothing to select

Installation

1. Clone into the plugins directory

git clone https://github.com/arcatva/dms-next-boot-selector.git \
  ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/NextBootSelector

2. Install the sudoers rule (required)

Writing EFI variables needs root. The plugin uses sudo -n, which requires a NOPASSWD rule scoped to exactly the two operations it performs:

sudo visudo -cf ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/NextBootSelector/dms-efibootmgr.sudoers
sudo install -m 0440 \
  ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/NextBootSelector/dms-efibootmgr.sudoers \
  /etc/sudoers.d/dms-efibootmgr

The rule grants %wheel passwordless access to:

/usr/bin/efibootmgr --bootnext [0-9A-Fa-f][0-9A-Fa-f][0-9A-Fa-f][0-9A-Fa-f]
/usr/bin/efibootmgr --delete-bootnext

Nothing else. Adjust the group name if your distro doesn't use wheel.

Smoke test:

sudo -n efibootmgr --bootnext 0001 && sudo -n efibootmgr --delete-bootnext

If both succeed without prompting for a password, you're good.

3. Enable in DankMaterialShell

1. Open DMS Settings (Ctrl+,)
2. Plugins tab → Scan for Plugins → toggle Next Boot Selector on
3. Add it to your bar layout (Appearance → DankBar Layout) or to Control Center (Appearance → Control Center Widgets)

Configuration

All settings are editable via DMS Settings → Plugins → Next Boot Selector.

Key	Default	Description
privCmd	sudo -n	Command prefix for efibootmgr writes. Swap for pkexec if you prefer a polkit prompt (and have an agent running).
hideRegex	pxe|cd/dvd|removable device|network device	Case-insensitive JavaScript regex tested against each entry label. Leave empty to show every entry.
rebootAfterSet	false	When true, runs systemctl reboot immediately after setting BootNext.

How it works

• Read path: efibootmgr (no root needed for reads), parsed into {id, active, label} entries plus the current BootCurrent and BootNext values.
• Write path: sh -c "<privCmd> efibootmgr --bootnext XXXX 2>&1" so stderr ends up in stdout and surfaces in a toast on failure.
• Cross-instance state: DankMaterialShell creates a separate plugin instance for the Control Center detail panel, one without a pluginId, which means pluginData and PluginGlobalVar both break. State (entries, bootCurrent, bootNext) is shared via PluginService.setGlobalVar with a hardcoded plugin ID, and every instance subscribes to onGlobalVarChanged to stay reactive. Settings are read the same way via SettingsData.getPluginSetting instead of pluginData.
• Layout: Both the bar pill popout and the CC detail use the same pattern — header on top, buttons pinned to the bottom, a DankFlickable in between so long boot tables scroll without hiding the Clear / Reboot actions.

Known limitations

• First open after shell restart has a ~150 ms flash of the loading state. The plugin reads efibootmgr asynchronously; the first instance to mount pays the cost, subsequent instances read from the shared global var. If you keep the bar pill enabled, the bar instance absorbs this cost at shell startup and the CC open is instant. If you only use the CC widget, the flash shows up on the first open per session.
• External changes are not auto-detected. If you run efibootmgr in a terminal while the shell is running, the widget won't notice until another write triggers a refresh. Click the bar pill or reopen the CC detail to force a re-read.
• Uses sudo -n by default. If the sudoers rule isn't installed, writes fail immediately with a toast rather than prompting — that's intentional. Switch privCmd to pkexec if you want a GUI prompt (requires a polkit agent like hyprpolkit-agent running in your session).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.