[xubuntu-users] XFCE4 desktop menus

[Roger W. Broseus]

Chris and Ulli,

Excuse the top post but this is the way *I* think.

For some time I, too, was puzzled by menu editing. Now I don't find it 
particularly hard to edit drop items on the whisker menu, using Settings > 
Menu Editor.

But, getting a click-able item on the desktop was a challenge. Once I found 
the method, it's just a bit tedious. I've had to do so with my preferred file 
manager, Nemo. After installing it, I found that I can launch it from the CLI 
merely by giving the command nemo. So, to create an icon to execute an app 
from the desktop,

Right-click on a blank area on the desktop
Select Create Launcher
Give it a name, e.g., Nemo
Type nemo in the "Command:" box
click on the Icon dialog button
Up comes a large number of candidate icons, one of which was for Nemo!
Click on Create

And the icon appears on the desktop. On first use, click on the Mark 
Executable button.

That's it.

One can also drag this new icon to one a panel to make it more accessible. 
(Panel e.g., a "strip" along the top edge of the desktop where there are icons 
to initiate execution of apps.)

More complicated is creating a launcher for an application which does not 
appear in Ubuntu software installer pool. For example, I installed gRip, an 
app to rip and create MP3 files, obtained from another source. grip was 
installed from in /opt so I had to enter
     /opt/grip/bin/grip
in the command box. Getting an icon was more of a challenge. I created a small 
image using The GIMP to do a selection from an on-line image and saving it as 
a .ico file.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Roger
linux.rog at gmail.com



On 01/26/2018 05:33 PM, Chris Dunn wrote:
>> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 17:12:10 +0100
>> From: Ulli Horlacher<framstag at rus.uni-stuttgart.de>
>>
>> On Mon 2018-01-22 (17:00), Chris Dunn wrote:
>>> Are there known problems with setting up xfce4 desktop (right click)
>>> menus in Xubuntu?
>> Various!
> Many different varieties.
>
>>> With a combination of MenuLibre and manually editing
>>> ~/.local/share/applications/***.desktop files I have my menu pretty
>>> well as I want it on another box running Debian.
>>>
>>> On this Xubuntu tablet nothing really seems to work fully. I've
>>> tried MenuLibre, alacarte and manually editing ***.desktop and
>>> ***.directory files but after hours of effort can't get the menus
>>> how I want them.
>>>
>>> Does anybody else have similar experience?
>> Yes.
>>
>> I do a lot of try and error.
> For what it may be worth I've pretty much given up, which is really
> annoying. Should it really be this difficult just to create a personal
> XFCE menu?
>
> There are certainly bugs, but whether they are in xfdesktop or in
> Whisker menu or in Menulibre or some combination of them I'm not sure.
> Trying to describe the problems encountered would fill a book, and would
> make very heavy reading. That makes it almost impossible to file a bug
> report, and then which app to file the bug(s) against?
>
> As noted before, the process went much more smoothly on a machine
> running Debian + XFCE, although not without some difficulties. The
> Debian machine has xfdesktop version 4.12.4 and xfce4-popup-whiskermenu
> 1.6.2 compared to xfdesktop version 4.12.3 and xfce4-popup-whiskermenu
> 2.1.3 on my xubuntu box. Not sure how far this explains the difference
> in experience.
>
> I did discover a new version, just released, of menulibre (2.1.4) and
> really recommend that anybody trying to edit menus, upgrades to this
> version. It seems to have fixed some bugs and has some useful extra
> features.
>
> Ulli, thanks for your post. At least I know I'm not alone.

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