Mint 17 Xfce Applications Menu

[glitchathon]

Hi there,
I am still on Qiana and for the past year have been struggling with MenuLibre and items missing from the applications menu (that occurs when I right-click). Today, I removed the xfce-applications.menu file from /home/username/.config/menus/folder and it seems to have fixed the problem. Does anyone happen to know if I am missing anything from deleting that file? I assume the default settings are in place from the the file in /usr/share/xfcemint?

If I want to start editing the menu again, should I just edit the .desktop files manually. I would like to avoid ever opening up MenuLibre again, as it seems very buggy.

Is it necessary to recreate the xfce-applications.menu from an original install of Mint Xfce 17? I admit to still being confused as to how to properly get my menu back to its original state.

Thanks for any guidance on this!

[GeneBenson]

Hi glitchathon,

Could tell us what you are trying to achieve by editing the application menu? Are you trying to hide an application, make a hidden application show up, change the category it appears in?

[glitchathon]

Hi Gene,
Thanks for the reply. I was initially hoping to add my own separators, add a few other desktop items to top level, maybe hide a few categories. Is it safe to say that all of the stuff that MenuLibre did was in the xfce-applications.menu file that I deleted as well as the .desktop files in .local/shared? I am hoping that I can gain back some control over the menu mostly through the .desktop files, and maybe create a new xfce-applications.menu file to tweak the order a bit.

[GeneBenson]

Hi glitchathon,

is it safe to say that all of the stuff that MenuLibre did was in the xfce-applications.menu file that I deleted as well as the .desktop files in .local/shared?

I've never used MenuLibre but I don't have a "/home/username/.config/menus/folder/xfce-applications.menu" so I can only assume that it came from MenuLibre.

I was initially hoping to add my own separators, add a few other desktop items to top level, maybe hide a few categories.

Some yes, some no. You could edit a .desktop file in place but I would strongly recommend that you copy it to your Home folder in ~/.local/share/applications and edit it there.

You can add a desktop item to the top level by adding ";X-Xfce-Toplevel" to the Categories= line like this:

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Categories=Network;X-XFCE;X-Xfce-Toplevel;

You can't hide an entire category in a desktop file but you can hide a single entry by adding the line:

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NoDisplay=True

Sometimes an item doesn't show up in the menu, possibly because it contains a line like this:

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OnlyShowIn=MATE

(or KDE, GNOME, ...) when you are running XFCE.
Delete this line to make it show up in the menu.

In my experience a category will disappear from the menu when it is empty. So instead of trying to hide the category why not just uninstall the programs in that category?

[ajgreeny]

I still use alacarte as the menu editor application for xfce-4.12 that I have in Xubuntu 14.04. It seems much easier to use than menulibre which I tried but found confusing.

[glitchathon]

Thanks for the help. It looks like I can do most of what I want with the .desktop file categories. For the most part, the default order is fine, and I probably could just uninstall a lot of stuff to clean it up the way I want it.