Xfce Forum

bradm0

Member

Registered: 2013-01-10

Posts: 3

[Solved] Newbie asking for help creating a customized menu

I'm a GNOME refugee and am trying to create a customized menu to hold launchers for my most commonly used documents.  I've managed to add a custom menu called "My Docs" but it's empty.  I've created the following file in ~/.config/menus named MyDocs.menu
cat MyDocs.menu
<!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/me … 0/menu.dtd">

<Menu>
        <Name>MyDocs</Name>
        <Filename>budget.desktop</Filename>
</Menu>

Then in ~/.local/share/applications I have this file called budget.desktop
cat budget.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Budget
Comment=test
Exec=soffice /home/mine/data/LibreOffice/SpreadSheet/budget.ods
Type=Application

But nothing shows up in my custom menu.  If I add the line
Categories=Office;

Then I can get it to appear in the Mageia menu under the Office sub-menu.  That'll work as a work around but I really would like to have these in a separate menu if possible.  I've looked at the wiki http://wiki.xfce.org/howto/customize-menu  and have tried to follow those steps but I seem to be missing something that's probably intuitive.  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

wilker

Member

Registered: 2012-11-16

Posts: 27

Re: [Solved] Newbie asking for help creating a customized menu

which distro are you using?
would you consider using alacarte? (it depends on some gnome stuff, i think) or are you already trying to escape from the gnome dependencies? it is a GUI to create and edit the menus.
i think there is a menu editor wrote in java, for lxde, and i have read it works on xfce.

regards

bradm0

Member

Registered: 2013-01-10

Posts: 3

Re: [Solved] Newbie asking for help creating a customized menu

I'm running Mageia 2, 32-bit.  Mageia 2 is one of the distros that suffers from this alacarte bug
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2911

I looked at lxmed and that seemed to let me add Application launchers but not create a separate menu or add sub-menus to the existing Main menu.  If I missed something in lxmed let me know.  Thanks.

bradm0

Member

Registered: 2013-01-10

Posts: 3

Re: [Solved] Newbie asking for help creating a customized menu

OK.  Persistence paid off.  In ~/.config/menus I have the file MyDocs.menu with this content:
cat MyDocs.menu
<!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/me … 0/menu.dtd">

<!-- AUTHOR tpg@mandriva.org -->

<Menu>
    <Name>MyDocs</Name>
   
    <DefaultMergeDirs/>
    <DefaultAppDirs/>
    <DefaultDirectoryDirs/>

    <Include>
        <Category>X-Xfce-Toplevel</Category>
    </Include>

    <Layout>
        <Filename>xfrun4.desktop</Filename>
        <Separator/>
        <Filename>budget.desktop</Filename>
        <Filename>expenses2012.desktop</Filename>
        <Filename>expenses2013.desktop</Filename>
    </Layout>
</Menu>

Then, in ~/.local/share/applications I have the desktop files.  An example is shown here:
cat budget.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Budget
Comment=test
Exec=soffice /home/mine/data/LibreOffice/SpreadSheet/budget.ods
Categories=X-Xfce-Toplevel;
Icon=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/libreoffice3.6-startcenter.png
Type=Application

To add the menu,
Right click the top panel and select Panel -> Add New Items
Select Applications Menu and click the Add button
Right click the newly added Applications menu and select Properties.  Under Appearance I changed the Button title to something other than Applications Menu (eg My Docs).
In the Menu File section I selected Use custom menu file and pointed it to ~/.config/menus/MyDocs.menu

I also moved the menu over to be next to my list of apps on the menu panel
Right click the top panel and select Panel -> Panel Preferences
Select the Items tab
Locate the Applications Menu entry from the bottom of the list (the first one is the Mageia main menu so I left it alone)
click the up arrow icon to move the custom menu up until it is in the desired location. 

Not sure if this will help anyone but just wanted to share.  Thanks very much.

Last edited by bradm0 (2013-01-11 14:06:28)