[SOLVED] Reorder positions of items in xfce panel settings menu

Question

Hallo everybody yet again :-)
Just a quick question;
What would be the best (read quickest / possibly not the simplest one) solution for reordering items in my Xfce settings menu user-wide?
Thanks,
Last edited by MatejLach (2012-01-06 12:51:27)

Answer 1

I was just poking around in my /etc/xdg/menus/xfce-applications.menu file. After some experimentation, I was able to figure out how the menu files work for the most part.
You'll need to know the filenames of each of the .desktop files for the programs you want. [Some of them have weird names that are different from the obvious application name. You can get a list of all of them by doing "ls /usr/share/applications"]
The menu format is pretty similar to html. Here's an example menu with two submenus:
I'm not sure if shell-script style comments are allowed in the .menu file, they're there merely for explanation's sake, so you should take them out if you use this as a template.
/home/user/.somedir/silly.menu
<!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 1.0//EN"
"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu-spec/1.0/menu.dtd">
# This is the top level container
<Menu>
<Name>Top</Name>
# You need these here
<DefaultAppDirs/>
<DefaultDirectoryDirs/>
<DefaultMergeDirs/>
# For include tags, always put <All/> under them so you can match everything and order them manually
<Include>
<All/>
</Include>
# This is the skeleton of your main menu
<Layout>
<Filename>xfrun4.desktop</Filename>
<Separator/>
<Menuname>Cats</Menuname>
<Separator/>
<Menuname>Dogs</Menuname>
<Separator/>
<Filename>xfce4-session-logout.desktop</Filename>
</Layout>
# This is the first Submenu
<Menu>
# Give it a name, and put the .directory file for it here
<Name>Dogs</Name>
<Directory>dogs.directory</Directory>
# Same deal with the include tag
<Include>
<All/>
</Include>
# This is where you put the items for this menu, They'll be in order from top to bottom.
<Layout>
<Filename>medit.desktop</Filename>
<Filename>catfish.desktop</Filename>
</Layout>
</Menu>
# Second submenu, Same thing as the first submenu
<Menu>
<Name>Cats</Name>
<Directory>cats.directory</Directory>
<Include>
<All/>
</Include>
<Layout>
<Filename>pidgin.desktop</Filename>
<Filename>deadbeef.desktop</Filename>
</Layout>
</Menu>
</Menu>
To define custom submenu names and icons, you need to put files for them in /usr/share/desktop-directories. There's also preset .directory files as well if you want to use those.
One of my dummy .directory files:
/usr/share/desktop-directories/dogs.directory
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Directory
Icon=chromium
Name=Dogs
If you want them in an order that is not alphabetical, you're going to have to define each menu entry separately, like in my little example above. If you want them in alphabetical order, you can edit the .desktop files of the programs you want with your preferred text editor, and put them all in the same category. Then for the <Includes> tag of that submenu, you'd put something like this:
<Include>
<Category>MyCategory</Category>
</Include>
If you do go with this method however, make sure you leave the first <All/> alone in the top-level menu, otherwise, your submenus probably won't appear.
To use your custom menu, you just go into the preferences for the menu plugin, select custom menu, and point it at the .menu that you created.
If you wanted to put a submenu under one of your other submenus, you would put the <Menu>...</Menu> entry for it between </Layout> and </Menu> of the menu you want to put it under.
With this, you can make custom menus on a per-user basis. If I'm mis-interpreting and you want it system-wide, you could just save it as "/etc/xdg/menus/xfce-applications.menu" which is the default menu file for the whole system.
This is what the example menu file looks like like on the panel plugin: http://imgur.com/X9ysj
Last edited by DarkSniper (2012-01-06 05:18:24)