How do I edit drop-down menus? Lucid 5.2.0 with xfce

[disciple]

The truth is, I don't really know how to create a .pet

Most pets are created when someone compiles a program, by running `new2dir make install` (instead of `make install`), and then `dir2pet`.

If you are manually creating something like an icon theme you need to create a directory somewhere with the name you want the pet to have e.g. "/crazy_icon_theme". (It might need a version number at the end of the folder name - I can't remember)
Inside that folder you put everything that needs to go in the pet, in a folder structure that matches the main file system. So if something needs to go in "/usr/share/pixmaps", then you put it in "/crazy_icon_theme/usr/share/pixmaps". Once everything is in there, open a terminal, run `cd /` so you're in the same directory as /crazy_icon_theme, then `dir2pet crazy_icon_theme`. It will ask you some questions and then create the pet.

I suppose I could get a pet, replace my icons into it, then rename it accordingly...

If you're thinking of opening it with xarchiver or something to do that: well, you could, but it would be a corrupted pet. A pet is a .tar.gz with an md5sum or something on the end, to provide a check when you install it that it downloaded correctly. If you replaced files in an existing pet then the md5 would no longer match. You need to use dir2pet.

[disciple]

I'm afraid I've never looked at how the menu icons work with themes.

I do know that with a normal distro when you change the icon theme a lot of the menu icons change, but not quite all of them. e.g. the icon for a number of browsers will change, but I think the icon for firefox won't. I'm not sure if that's because some .desktop files specify an icon with its path (and only the ones with no path use theme icons), or because a lot of .desktop files use a generic icon that is usually included in a theme (but others use their own special icon that isn't).

I have a feeling a lot of indigenous Puppy apps use icons that aren't included in most themes. I think theming works using symlinks, in which case if there is a suitable replacement icon in most themes your best option might be to overwrite the icon the .desktop file refers to with a symlink to the suitable theme symlink. But if you wanted to keep the theme after updating puppy, the easiest way might be to put that symlink in a pet, and reinstall it after the update.