Unscrambling xfce's mismanagement of Puppy Categories

Window managers, icon programs, widgets, etc.
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mikeslr
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Unscrambling xfce's mismanagement of Puppy Categories

#1 Post by mikeslr »

Hi All,

While trying to get Whisker-menu under xfce4-panel to play nice with Puppies, I kept finding that applications built for Puppy rarely showed up in categories where I'd expect them. Many were assigned to "Other". When I set out to construct xfce4-panel to work with LxPup64 I noticed applications appeared in a "proper" Category. So I examined what peebee did and copied his technique. Essentially, that involved writing a file named xfce-applications.menu in which all the various subcategories used in creating applications for Puppy are assigned to their parent categories.

Download the attached file, rename it, removing the 'false' zip ending and copy it into either /etc/xdg/menus and/or /root/.config/menus after changing the name of any existing xfce-applications.menu to old- xfce-applications.menu [just in case you have to revert].You may have to create the /root/.config/menus folder. A restart is necessary. The files in .config are supposed to take precedence over those in /etc. But, you never know. [The many arguments following Include in each Category specification may be ‘overkill’. Written –cut & paste from pre-existing files-- while TV was running in the background. I hadn’t analyzed why all existed for LxPup. Figured better safe than sorry. As this is a text file and does what I want, I don’t feel compelled to experiment. You can if you want.]

mikesLr
Attachments
xfce-applications.menu.zip
Rename, Removing False Zip ending. See post about where to place xfce-applications.menu
(11.8 KiB) Downloaded 339 times
Last edited by mikeslr on Sat 21 Oct 2017, 00:01, edited 2 times in total.

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battleshooter
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#2 Post by battleshooter »

Nice Mike, I just discovered this myself last week trying to work out why the categories weren't playing nice. Wish I saw this earlier, but thanks for posting, hopefully will help someone else trying to follow the XFCE in Puppy debugging bunny trail
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musher0
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#3 Post by musher0 »

Hi mikesLr.

This to let you know that I just gave your XML template for the xfce menu
(above) a little push here.

BFN.
musher0
~~~~~~~~~~
"You want it darker? We kill the flame." (L. Cohen)

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mikeslr
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#4 Post by mikeslr »

Hi musher0,

Thanks for the push.

I'm pretty sure I've said something like, "Everyone is smarter than (s)he thinks (s)he is". I didn't realize that I was among the class "Everyone." :shock:

Seems I can write XML code. 8) :lol: All I thought I was doing was imitating a technique peebee had already used to solve the problem of getting menus to recognize the Puppyism "X-Something" argument which often appears as a (sometimes the only) argument given to Categories= in /usr/share/something.desktop.

I probably should have read and understood the links from here, http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Configure_PuppyMenu as to how menus are created under Puppy's standard JWM window manager before translating Puppy's format to that required by the xfce structure employed by Whisker Menu. It is likely that such understanding would have (a) eliminated a lot of grunt work and (b) produced a more refined result.

musher0
Posts: 14629
Joined: Mon 05 Jan 2009, 00:54
Location: Gatineau (Qc), Canada

#5 Post by musher0 »

Hi, mikesLr.

Thanks for the thanks.

Like Molière once said: "We all do prose without knowing!" ;) :) That quote
is in the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme" somewhere. Poetry is something else,
but prose, everybody speaks in prose natively! :lol:

Not that I "speak" XML natively, far from it!!!

But back to being serious, I will give your list of categories a second look,
with a view of refining my own aemenu scripts, trying to make them more
complete. That's the problem with a skimming / condensing approach: if a
new app belongs to a category not in the starting list, it doesn't show up in
the menu.

So I have to have add-ons at the end of the script. Sort of Post-Scriptums
(aka P.S.), which are not very logical as a process. Or fatten up the starting
list, like you did.

BFN.
musher0
~~~~~~~~~~
"You want it darker? We kill the flame." (L. Cohen)

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