desktop display manager

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 2025-08-13 at 10:42 -0400, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> There used to be a program called alacarte that allowed one to modify
> menu entries. I don't know if it is available in Ubuntu, or even if it
> works.

Hi,

it's available for all Ubuntu releases.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=jammy&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=alacarte

It does work. How good it works depends. It's one of those tools to
generate and edit *.desktop files. You can also generate and edit those
*.desktop files with any text editor.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/example.html

The default files are located in /usr/share/applications/ or
/usr/local/share/applications/.

It's possible to override those files by files located in
~/.local/share/applications/. This is what editors like Alacarte are
doing.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_entries#Application_entry

If you edit those files manually with an editor you can customize your
menus way better. However, Alacarte is ok.

Note: The menus of some panels don't care about *.desktop files.

You can use more or less any howto from any distro, since those
*.desktop files are independent of the used distro. You unlikely need a
howto, since those files are largely self-explanatory.

Regards,
Ralf