11 Jun
2021
11 Jun
'21
7:12 p.m.
said Dr. Nikolaus Klepp:
| Hi dep!
Greetings, Nik!
| Anno domini 2021 Fri, 11 Jun 17:48:18 +0000
|
| dep scripsit:
| > Greets, folks . . .
| >
| > I just now spent five minutes looking in vain for PDF Arranger in my
| > kmenu. I have no doubt it's there, but in the decades of KDE3x and TDE
| > I've yet to have the kmenu search box work even once; meanwhile, items
| > in the submenus are spashed across them with no sense nor reason I can
| > find -- Settings, System, and Utilities are in many respects one
| > submenu distributed at random across three. Install a new application?
| > Where is it in the kmenu? It's not a menu, it's a *game*!
| >
| > (Example: I have the Gramps genealogy application installed. It's even
| > on the kmenu. Wanna know where it got stuck? Office > Database.)
| >
| > This doesn't matter if you have just a few applications installed.
| > More than that and you're screwed.
| >
| > The problem is exacerbated by new applications being installed any old
| > place within a submenu. Might be at the top. Might be at the bottom.
| > Might be in the middle. (And of course the classic favorite, in some
| > other sub- or sub-submenu entirely.)
| >
| > To make the game even more challenging, there's no practical way to
| > bring order to it. There's no way to arrange the applications in
| > alphabetical order within a submenu.
| >
| > And for advanced players, kmenu is festooned with some script that
| > without user intervention prevents the desktop from starting at all!
| >
| > Surely there's got to be a way to automagically (or let users)
| > organize the kmenu in TDE. Because as it stands, and has stood for
| > decades, it's an unholy mess.
| >
| > Is there a recipe or script or, well, anything?
|
| Well ... this the unholy grale of *.desktop ...
| Example: My build-script for pycam generates a .desktop-file with these
| entries ($NAME is replaced by "pycam" in this context):
|
| [Desktop Entry]
| Version=1.0
| Type=Application
| Exec=/opt/$NAME/start.sh
| Icon=/opt/$NAME/$NAME.png
| X-GNOME-DocPath=
| Terminal=false
| Name=PyCAM
| Comment=
| StartupNotify=false
| Categories=Science;X-CNC;
| Keywords=cnc;linuxcnc;$NAME
|
| The line with "Category" says where the most ingeniouse creator of the
| .desktop-file would like it to appear in the menus. In my case, it sould
| be placed in "X-CNC" which is the submenu of linuxcnc. If that's not
| there it will go to "Science". And if that's not existing, too,
| "Science" will hopefully be created. If the author of the .desktop-file
| would have given a second thought on this he probably would have
| realized that moving "pycan" to "Science" as fallback does not make
| great sense. But he (my inferior me) only uses this package on computers
| with linuxcnc, so it did not occur to him. As time goes by linuxcnc did
| not work on chimera for some time (python 2 got removed), and my
| brighter side complained to my inferior me about the stupidity of
| putting "pycam" in the alternative location "Science/pycam" when
| linuxcnc is not installed. My inferior me was able to solve that naging
| problem ... no, not by changing the .desktop file (that would have been
| too easy) but by checking out linuxcnc-master, which happens to work
| with python3 now ... so bug fixed, brilliant :)
|
|
| Nik
Um, yeah, okay . . . I believe you've made my point.
Nor is there any place I can find a simple file that contains all the
entries in one's KMenu, such that one might rearrange them by hand. It is
surely stored someplace, but I cannot find it. It ought to be able to be
opened in a spreadsheet such that the order could be altered with a click.
Or any of a multitude of formats.
But it is, as I mentioned, a mess.
--
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://www.athensnews.com/opinion/columns/the_view_from_mudsock_heights/