FC4 Gnome Menu Management--Any Improvement?

Flyboy917 · #1 9th June 2005, 05:53 AM

It goes without saying that editing you apps menu in Gnome/ Fedora sucks.
Any improvement with the new Gnome and FC4?

bytesniper · #2 9th June 2005, 06:08 AM

Quote:

It goes without saying that editing you apps menu in Gnome/ Fedora sucks.

Yeah.. its does. FC4 is shipping with KDE3.4 though *hint*

honestly i dont know if its improved or not, i really havent used gnome in a very long time.

ghaefb · #3 9th June 2005, 07:21 AM

Well in Fc4 test3 it's nothing new with Gnome menu editing, the menu is completely locked down.
I found a few GUIs for this job, but none of them were effective.

Manually editing .desktop files is still the way to go.

**Finalzone** · #4 9th June 2005, 07:25 AM

A revamped Menu Editor is expected to appear on Gnome 2.12 ie FC5. Current version still has a nasty issue to break menu.

foolish · #5 9th June 2005, 09:20 AM

For Core 4 there is the smeg menu editor, which actually works quite well. It is a bit limited in GNOME though, due to GNOME 2.10 only partial compliance with the freedesktop.org menu stanard. I've built packages and hope to get smeg into Fedora Extras sometime soon.

BandC · #6 9th June 2005, 09:31 PM

I honestly don't understand what's so hard about this. Aren't there only a couple of folders that are supposed house the .desktop files? And the format of the .desktop are (fairly) standard right? I would have expected like at least 5-10 open source programs that do this by now (or at least one that does it well). I have never done any GUI programming in Linux but if I have some time I may write an application for this. What language/API do you suggest for a GUI application? GTK+?

kylemaxwell · #7 9th June 2005, 10:42 PM

If it's going to be a GNOME app, yeah, you should probably use GTK+. If I were doing it, I'd do it in Perl (there are GTK bindings for it), but seems like a lot of these are written in Python these days.

There's a good online book for GNOME/GTK development written by Havoc Pennington.

I agree, it's not entirely clear to me why something so fundamental is still not a solved problem. I know that it's not particularly sexy and so doesn't attract very many developers, but it's a big enough itch for enough people that it should be scratched. Probably the most productive approach is to find one of the projects that is trying to tackle it (like maybe smeg, referenced above) and try to help out there.

BTW thanks foolish for the pointer, I'm going to give it a shot this weekend.