My apologies. The exact problem is that dmenu_run prints "warning: locale not supported" then just hangs there, when my locale is set to en_HK.UTF-8 (set with `sudo dpkg reconfigure locales`)
As I mentioned, I'm running i3 in a fresh install of Xubuntu 16.04, with a fresh install of i3, no configuration whatsoever. It works as expected when I do `LANG="en_US.UTF-8"` so I don't think it has anything to do with the environment. Warm Regards, Prashanth