Hm indeed, seq 1 10000 | wofi -S dmenu makes it clear that the list gets populated over time. Presumably all the options that I tried initially were from the top of the list and thus were populated into the list by the time I finished typing them in.

This is definitely not about the GTK widget. As I said, when I run dmenu_path | wofi -S dmenu, I get a wofi with 4346 options and that is displayed instantly.

When running as wofi -S run and searching for a hitherto unlaunched program, it sometimes takes several seconds until it shows up in the result list. I'm really confused by what's going on here.

It can't be GUI slowness or IO issues: When I run dmenu_path | wofi -S dmenu, all options are available pretty much instantly without any noticeable startup delay.

It's such a substantial difference that I'm honestly not sure if I am holding something wrong. Am I not setting some vital option? I would really like to use -S run since it puts recently used commands at the top of the list, but results sometimes show up so late that I run the wrong things.