torios team mailing list archive

[Israel <israel@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, I added more info

On 06/14/2014 03:32 PM, Israel wrote:
> ...
>> Hi Israel,
>>
>> OK, you know, when it is ready for other people to test, and to get it
>> from a ppa is a good alternative :-)
>>
>> I think it will work with a themes directory in the .jwm directory.
>>
>> A clean menu is a good thing. But you should also consider, what happens
>> when people install software packages (that automatically add entries
>> into the menu).
>>
>> Best regards
>> Nio
> Ye, this is what I am talking about...  the program menu works, to all
> programs installed with a menu entry file.  But the structure of the
> menu is less than desirable.  I am thinking we should modify the scripts
> that create the menu and/or the menu itself.  We can modify this by
> adding a .menu-methods folder to the user's home dir. 
> The problem with the current menu is some programs do not create this
> old-style menu file...  instead they only create a desktop file....
> (firefox is one example).  I think it would be beneficial to edit the
> script to scan the /usr/share/applications for *.desktop and parse that.
>
> You are pretty good at scripting it seems (since the OBI is so
> awesome).  Could you install jwm & menu and take a look at
> /etc/menu-methods/jwm  as well as the other stuff related like menu.h 
> to see if you can improve it?  I'd like for the menu not to say 'debian'
> and have so many categories.  It would be better to have a menu like
> LXDE where is has only a few categories.  You will also need to add .png
> to the end of the icon names from the desktop file (unless they have a
> full path i.e. /usr/share/pixmaps/example.xpm)
> Unless we want to override all the icons and have the script look to see
> if an overrided icon exists, and if so use that instead.
> The icon file name doesn't have to be the full path, unless it wont be
> in one of our default icon themes.
>
> I am only marginally capable of scripting at this point, so it would be
> very helpful if you could look into this, because I think the menu and
> the configurations are the 2 biggest hurdles to making jwm extremely usable.
>
> I am going to experiment using some icon themes, and see how it goes....
> I am thinking about using Moka, as it is really modern and clean
> looking.  I will test it out and post some screen shots if I get it
> looking really nice :)
>
So you know:

 the format for the menu items are
<Program label="Text Editor"
icon="accessories-text-editor.png">/usr/bin/gedit %U</Program>

So you could parse the desktop file and use
...
Name=gedit
GenericName=Text Editor
...
for label
....
Icon=accessories-text-editor
....
for Icon
...
Exec=gedit %U
...
as the executable part...  I'll have to test and see if using gedit %U
works without /usr/bin  and also see if it works with the %U part..

Using the desktop files would ensure a much better collection of apps. 
And if we store the script(s) in

~/.menu-methods

it should work as expected (though we will need to test this of course :)