Icon/launcher of "Personal" menu don’t work in IceWM toolbar

[Member Spartak77]

I have antiX 17.1 with IceWM + SpaceFM
In antiX 16, I had configured the file toolbar in order to have the “Personal” item/menu as an icon on the IceWM desktop toolbar.
The “Personal” item is normally a sub-menu of the Start-Menu but I find it more convenient to have a button on the toolbar with the program entries I use frequently. It’s a faster way to find an application than to look for it in the submenus of the Start-Menu.
I attach the image of my desktop IceWM-SpaceFM in antiX 16 with the personal menu that appears by clicking on the third button on the toolbar.

Now I’m customizing my antiX 17 installation and I cannot do the same thing.
I wrote the file ~/.icewm/personal using the items present in the file ~/.icewm/menu-applications, then I modified the file ~/.icewm/toolbar inserting this line:
menufile “Personal” /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/apps/32/config-users.png personal

this line is present in ~/.icewm/menu and I copied it to ~/.icewm/toolbar.
This same operation in antiX 16 works but in antiX 17 no.
Note. The Personal menu is correctly expressed by the Menu-start.

I cannot understand what problem is, and I haven’t idea if there is a Log file that can help me to understand the problem

Attachments:

1. 

   screenpersonale2.jpg
   

[Anonymous]

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Open your terminal and make a backup of your existing toolbar and personal configurations first:

cp ~/.icewm/toolbar ~/.icewm/toolbar-old
cp ~/.icewm/personal ~/.icewm/personal-old

Still in Terminal, try this:

nano ~/.icewm/toolbar

Add the following lines:

prog “Firefox ESR” /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/apps/32/firefox.png firefox
prog Terminal /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/apps/32/terminal.png desktop-defaults-run -t
prog “File Manager” /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/places/32/user-home.png desktop-defaults-run -fm

Remember to save the file (Strg + o and Enter)!
Exit with Strg + x.

Repeat for Personal.

nano ~/.icewm/personal

prog “Firefox ESR” /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/apps/32/firefox.png firefox
prog Terminal /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/apps/32/terminal.png desktop-defaults-run -t
prog “File Manager” /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/places/32/user-home.png desktop-defaults-run -fm

Save the file and exit.

Log out and log in again or restart iceWM.

Latest now, you should have the Firefox, Terminal and File Manager on your Toolbar and under the Start Menu / Personal.

If that works for you, then adding any other applications should work too.

[Member Spartak77]

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Thanks MissTell for the help, unfortunately I could not solve.
I did a test following the istructions you gave me.
At first, I ran
cp ~/.icewm/toolbar ~/.icewm/toolbar-old
as you pointed out, then I preferred to give this command
mv ~/.icewm/toolbar ~/.icewm/toolbar-old
so that I have a clean toolbar file on which to insert the three lines that you have indicated to me.
I saved, etc. following your instructions (Strg is the word used in Germany to indicate the key “Ctrl”, right?)
Initially appeared me, on toolbar and on start-menu only the “terminal” item, then I realized that I had a problem with the quotes: copied from the forum message were not good: they should be retyped.
Okay, when I finally completed the instructions and logged-out and logged-in everything worked fine, but when I added the line:
menufile "Personal" /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/apps/32/config-users.png personal
to the toolbar file and to the menu file, saving and doing log-out
then at the login, in the start-menu appeared the icon of the personal sub-menu and all the items previously inserted in the personal file appeared, while in the toolbar appeared the icon/button of the personal sub-menu, but clicking on the icon does not open anything.
Exactly how it had presented itself to me before I asking help in this forum

I also tried to check the permissions of the file ~/.icewm/personal (and also of all the other files in the folder ~/.icewm/) but it’s all regular, there isn’t a permissions problem.
Since in antiX 16 the personal sub-menu worked in the toolbar I tried to check if there are any differences in the settings of IceWM of antiX 16 compared to antiX 17.
I looked for differences in the ~/.icewm/preferences and ~/.icewm/winoptions files of the two antix versions, but there aren’t significant differences.

Now I ask you, if you try to insert in your file ~/.icewm/toolbar
the line :
menufile "Personal" /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/apps/32/config-users.png personal
and then, by clicking on the “personal” icon that appears in the toolbar, do you open the entries contained in the file ~/.icewm/personal?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Spartak77.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Spartak77.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Spartak77.

[Anonymous]

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Can you really use lines starting with “menufile” inside the toolbar file? I thought all non-comment lines in that file needed to start with “prog”.
Every icon displayed in toolbar is expected to “launch” some program or script, right? I don’t know if we can link to a non-executable menufile from the toolbar.

[Anonymous]

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Nope, it doesn’t open.

Short answer: you are missing the proper command to start.

Longer answer:

My suggestion above had a purpose to check if the toolbar works as it should and, as it seems — it does.

Your aim would need to be answered by one of the developers who know more about iceWM.

The thing is: You are adding it not the proper way.

Adding something in Toolbar works as:

TYPE_OF_STARTER | ICON_PATH | START_COMMAND -ADDITIONAL_OPTION(S)

That said, what you are trying here is to start the option w/o command.

Somebody who knows the exact command would have to give us a command itself first and then the “pass over” option for it to be able to open a submenu directly.

As a workaround, there would be a possibility to make a folder shortcut on toolbar which would point to ~/.local/share/applications/MY_PERSONAL_STARTERS and in which one you could copy and paste its own application selection from /usr/share/applications. That way, you wouldn’t have to write your own starters since all .desktop files would continue working.

If you activate the Rox Panel on top, you’ll see exactly what I mean. Unfortunately, “Apps” is preconfigured wrong so it points to /usr/share instead to /usr/share/applications.

I personally can’t see much sense in doing it anyway because, either one starts per left click on Start Menu / Personal or by right click somewhere on desktop / Personal and the most important half a dozen app starters are anyway placed directly on the toolbar — having submenu directly on the toolbar means that you’d have to open it first before you could pick one application to start and that needs exactly as many clicks as the right click on desktop option.

[Moderator caprea]

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Anonymous wrote:

an you really use lines starting with “menufile” inside the toolbar file? I thought all non-comment lines in that file needed to start with “prog”.
Every icon displayed in toolbar is expected to “launch” some program or script, right? I don’t know if we can link to a non-executable menufile from the toolbar.

I think 736b..is right about here.
https://github.com/ice-wm/man/blob/master/icewm-toolbar.md

But then the question remains why it was possible in antiX16 and also in antiX14, which I just tried, without any problems.

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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It works on my 17.1 base version installed in VBox. I added this line below the existing one in toolbar and also left another empty line below it. line

menufile "Personal" /usr/share/icons/Faenza-Cupertino-mini/apps/32/config-users.png personal

This version is running buster repos.

Same 17.1-base.iso running live in VBox, doesn’t work. Weird!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by anticapitalista.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Anonymous]

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https://github.com/bbidulock/icewm/blob/c52418649e5ced5fb1109ac2d203ad23e29e4fad/doc/icewm.adoc
Looking at that compared to lines posted in this forum, maybe expected quotation marks missing are causing icewm to treat the line as malformed and ignore the line?

[Member Spartak77]

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I Thank you all for your answers. I apologize for answering so late, but I did not have time to devote to the computer.
Intrigued by your answers where you said that the menufile “personal” worked in the toolbar also in antiX 14 and in the new building antiX based on “buster”, I wanted to do some ‘testing on Virtualbox hoping to find the file with the setting that prevented to be able to use the menufile “personal” also on antiX 17

I saw that in antiX 17 was installed the package icewm (and icewm-common) 1.4.2, but at the same time in the stable repos there was also the package icewm 1.3.8 (which is the same version present in antiX 16) so I told synaptic to force the version and move the package back to the previous version.
Doing so, it changed the system’s files of Icewm, while those in my home have remained the same as I already had (so my previous edits, on icewm files in my home, have been left).
Then I restarted icewm and magically and magically the menufile “personal” worked fine in the toolbar.

Through Synaptic I saw the list of files installed with the icewm package and compared the two versions of each file to find the line that gave the setting that prevented the menufile ”personal” to working in the toolbar in Icewm 1.4.2.
After some research I found the file. It is /usr/bin/icewm. Taking this file from icewm 1.3.8 and replacing it with the one present in /usr/bin/icewm in my antiX 17(icewm 1.4.2) here is that the menufile personal worked perfectly in toolbar.
Unfortunately it’s not a text file, it’s a binary file, so the user can’t easily modify it (maybe you could act on the source package, but that goes beyond my interest, my skills, and my time).
I then wanted to do another test.
On antiX 17 installed in virtualbox with stable repositories, I temporarily enabled debian’s repo tests and found the icewm and icewm-common packages at version 1.4.3. I installed these two packages (and about ten dependencies) that have updated the present version 1.4.2.
I restarted icewm, and Ifound the menufile “personal” working.
So the problem would seem to be limited exclusively to version 1.4.2

Anticapitalista writes:

It works on my 17.1 base version installed in VBox.
Same 17.1-base.iso running live in VBox, doesn’t work. Weird!

Indeed it is strange. Let’s hope that when antiX 18 is ready there will be no this incongruity.

Ok. It’s not so important, I’m probably one of the very few users who uses this menufile in the toolbar and I can easily do without it. But if this menufile works I’m happier.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Spartak77.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Spartak77.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Spartak77 wrote:

…
Ok. It’s not so important, I’m probably one of the very few users who uses this menufile in the toolbar and I can easily do without it. But if this menufile works I’m happier.

Sounds like correcting the binary image corrects the problem. I’m sure that we can have a working binary in place (and I am guessing this has already been fixed, or will be very soon).

--
Brian Masinick

[Member Spartak77]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

I’m sure that we can have a working binary in place (and I am guessing this has already been fixed, or will be very soon).

Great!

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