Xfce Forum

badsector

Member

Registered: 2014-08-28

Posts: 24

bring back the magic

Long ago I had a parent directory called '~/0/command'
with under it some fifty others at different depths
and hosting my mostly bash scripts. I also had another
under /0/ consisting of every imaginable mountpoint
each exclusively dedicated to and explicitly named for
the device it would cater to. For example /0/sa12 was
the dedicated mountpoint for /dev/sda12 and so on for
each of up to 4-6 drives with up to a dozen or more
partitions on each. Times have changed, fewer are the
drives and partitions now but the system and its value
to me remain rock-solid ..except for one thing.

The cascading command menu shown in the screenshot

allowed me to mount/unmount any device in no more
than 3 clicks, with two of those reserved for double
clicking the exectutable. I would mount/unmount every
time on need and never leave anything mounted for any
longer than the exact time required for a given
operation. This also had a security angle to it although
my primary objective was confusion avoidance :-)

I would use such scripts to start/stop apache, and to
run all manner of housekeeping chores, about 400 mostly
very simple scripts in all, no one-line one-oh-wonders.
Most of my scripts ran in a terminal window and while
at it they also echoed the commands used so the entire
exercise was also continuously educational. In the same
way such echoing of commands wouldn't hurt GUI windows
either but let me not cloud the issue.

I intend to float this topic in Suse (with which I use
Plasma) and in XFCE quarters because those are my currently
active ones but other devs are welcome to lean into the
challenge at will. Pulse allows me to incorporate such
items into the application cascading menu but the looks
of that I wouldn't brag about, three deep and there goes
the entire screen width if you know what I mean. No, what
I miss is the gimped example in this screenshot: crisp,
efficient, lean, very small, filterable on/off file extensions
or dots or whatever.

Thank you for your attention.

Skaperen

Member

From: right by Jesus, our Saviour

Registered: 2013-06-15

Posts: 819

Re: bring back the magic

it sounds to me like you want an IUI (interactive user interface) to replace/enable most, or particular, commands (perhaps only referring to your scripts).  sounds useful to me.  i believe the GUI world is "sort of" aiming for this.  but, i don't see how this is an XFCE thing.  if you implement this, perhaps it could (or should) work under any display environment.

badsector

Member

Registered: 2014-08-28

Posts: 24

Re: bring back the magic

it sounds to me like you want an IUI (interactive user interface) to replace/enable most, or particular, commands (perhaps only referring to your scripts).  sounds useful to me.  i believe the GUI world is "sort of" aiming for this.  but, i don't see how this is an XFCE thing.  if you implement this, perhaps it could (or should) work under any display environment.

"It" was one of the early KDE 'widgets', that's how I remember it. Then came another one replacing it and that 2nd one was inferior, not as flexible, not as compact, not as useful. THEN came the better known 'Quick-Access' widget, even worse, 3rd generation if I remember correctly. Since then I saw some 'folder-view' thingie as well that was so far from the original that I never put in my panel. The cited original was simply a filterable cascading file-manager of sorts allowing you to in essence issue your own scripted commands with fewer clicks than it takes to launch, click into and cd in a terminal window. You did not have to muck with setting up a menu tree or nothing of the sort, just gave it a home folder, maybe some filter-and-click rules and done! Some older users might remember it, or even find the original code. Me, I'm no dev to do the honors of reforking :-)

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: bring back the magic

I'm not really sure I understood fully, but I think you can achieve what you want with the native Xfce Directory Menu panel plugin: https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/directorymenu

Please tell us how it goes!

badsector

Member

Registered: 2014-08-28

Posts: 24

Re: bring back the magic

I'm not really sure I understood fully, but I think you can achieve what you want with the native Xfce Directory Menu panel plugin: https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/directorymenu

Please tell us how it goes!

Thanks for chiming in. I took a look at it again (I had once before tried it). It seems to give what could be called a directed file-manager opening akin to commanding from a terminal 

dolphin /home/user/mystuff

which one could also GUI-ize via a duplicate dolphin icon set up to do the same thing on a single click for which I'd need 400 icons :-)    The number-of-clicks is everything, going via a terminal as above means about 30 clicks and that can be only either desired or unacceptable. There's a similar Plasma widget called 'Folder View'.

Then there is the KDE Menu Editor (perhaps an XFCE equivalent) but it involves no end of setup. In addition the monitor real-estate handling is not too pretty, compare it to the cascade cited in the OP:

The widget I remember does much more than the above but there is a difference between what it did and what I might remember that it did. The first situation would be covered by finding an archival copy of the source somewhere. The second one takes me into possibly wishful thinking as to what I think I remember or what I think I would have liked. I will try to be more verbose and itemize:

1
Left button on the panel icon opens a conventional cascading menu tree, necessarily a fairly compact one (my xfce default menu looks not bad in this respect).

2
The menu tree stays open and reverse navigable until the next click (or button release) which currently in cascading menus usually activates the choice. 

3
Because powerful executables may be involved my choice is always double-clicking to activate in such cases including file-managers working in folders containing executables. I don't remember how this worked with the original widget but I would certainly prefer it to be at least a general option (no folder by folder settings however, the whole idea being one of no unnecessary restrictions). The only thing to give the beast has to be a parent folder and possibly complex but always global filtering and/or double-click rules.

4
As soon as activated the cascade collapses and the invoked script takes over.

There's little else I could add: no constraints, simplicity, compactness, speed!  Let's take an fdisk -l for example, for users who may need this frequently. Two clicks in main menu to launch a terminal, another into the terminal, 2 for for 'su' and maybe 10 for password and finally fdisk -l for another and this time final 9 and a total of two dozen. With the subject widget it's 3 clicks only, end of story. Users like me benefit from this but I guess that some devs could see more measurable productivity increases.

When I was playing with this I even had a targeted reboot scripts where the srript would rewrite the grub (legacy) menu into a single-choice automatic boot, just to give scope to the possibilities. As I said I'm no dev, but THEY will see usage opportunities I never could :-)