11 Jun
2021
11 Jun
'21
6:31 p.m.
Hi dep!
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
--
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://www.athensnews.com/opinion/columns/the_view_from_mudsock_heights/
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