[tde-users] Re: Is there any saving of KMenu?

said deloptes: | dep wrote: | > 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. | | This is not quite true. When application is being searched the kmenu | disables all menus where the string is not found. thus you can navigate | only there where the string is found Right. Problem is, it's impossible to tell what it's called in KMenu. I've spent much of the afternoon -- still not done -- using kmenuedit to impose some order on KMenu. For some reason it lists applications not by name but by description, possibly due to the high concept of naming every KDE application something that begins with K, making it impossible to tell by name what the thing does. Exhibit A: Kivio. But the description is often unhelpful as well. So organization has involved not just sorting but giving useful names to applications where it's not obvious and eliminating the descriptions entirely. | > 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.) | | This is related to the *.desktop topic Nik was refereing. Its origin is of less concern to me than its very existence. | > 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. | | This is definitely not the best to do - the applications are grouped by | type. Once you know which application you are using, once you know where | to find it. I guess you're the only one complaining about that. In the | beginning I also did not understand the logic. Meanwhile I find it very | good and will oppose changing it. We get to choose a variety of less-important things. I am not proposing a rule for everyone. I propose that users get to decide themselves, individually, even as they can have pink-green titlebar gradients if that's what suits their fancy. A "sort by" dropbox in kmenuedit oughtn't be any more difficult than the option to sort by various criteria in Konqueror. | > And for advanced players, kmenu is festooned with some script that | > without user intervention prevents the desktop from starting at all! | | I do not understand what you mean here. What script? The one that blows up at the start of many if not most TDE sessions. r14-xdg-update, I believe it's called. | > 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? | | So for decades you've been using KDE now TDE and still did not | learn/understand how the kmenu works? I know how smallpox works and have for years, but that does not spark in me affection for smallpox. Of course I know how it works and have for as long as there has been such a thing as the KMenu, during the pre-1.0 betas. It is unnecessarily complicated and it does not give users a choice in a system built on doing just that. | I do not want to insult you or make fun of you. The topic is very | complex and I am afraid TDE has to comply to some specifications. So is | TDE following the XDG. This is why you can still find your Gramps | application in the TDE menu although it is not part of TDE. | You can also find GIMP and other programs that are not part of TDE. | Unfortunately the developer decides where they will show up. I am happy that TDE complies with standards set by some group someplace. My objection is to users not being able to confound those specifications when, to the user, they make no sense. Which ought to be easy but isn't. | I suggest you have a look at Desktop under | https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ | | 1. Desktop files | https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry- |spec-1.0.html 2. Menu entries from desktop files | https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-1.0.html | | I do not know how it is possible to modify this to suit your personal | needs. It seems the directories are defined in 2. | IMO you could write a script to modify the desktop files or save | somewhere in your home directory (may be .trinity/... something and | overwrite the default), but I am not sure this is possible. But, you see, I do not give a toot for those specifications. I would like items to appear in alphabetical order on my computer on my desk. I do not propose that you must do that. I do not propose that anyone else must do that. I propose that I be able to do that. | out of curiosity I wrote this to tell me which are the desktop files and | what is the Category configured | | locate .desktop | while read file; do | STR=$(grep "Categories=" $file) | if [ -n "$STR" ]; then | echo "==========" | echo $file | echo $STR | fi | done And when I'm imterested in the contents of a .desktop file, I open that file in a text editor and look at it. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://www.athensnews.com/opinion/columns/the_view_from_mudsock_heights/