- This topic has 6 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated Feb 14-5:13 pm by PPC.
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PPC
To be honest, one feature of antiX that I never use is the “Personal” menu – I have it disabled in my menu as I had with the “help” menu back on the days it showed), after all, if I wanted to use a sub-menu, I would just use the Applications sub-menu (in my case, I placed all the categories on the first layer of my menu, to save time)
If you ever used FT10, you’ll probably noticed that I tried to make it have easy ways to pin apps in the top of the menu or the toolbar. antiX already has (although a bit crude) GUI to add apps to it’s toolbar. What about a GUI to add apps to the menu?
It already exists, you just need to tweak your config files to make use of it:
Step 1- disable the personal menu:
– antiX Menu > Control Center > IceWM… > Menu
– comment out (placing a # on the start of the line) menufile “Personal Menu” /usr/share/icons/papirus-antix/48×48/apps/preferences-desktop-user.png personal
(the part inside the quotation marks depends on your locale. In pt is should say “Menu Pessoal”, etc…)Step 2- make the first layer of the menu show your favourite apps, that you placed in the “Personal” menu
– Still on that config file, before the line that says “menufile “Applications” /usr/share/icons/papirus-antix/48×48/apps/applications.png menu-applications
(the part inside the quotation marks depends on your locale. In pt is should say “Aplicações”, etc…) add this line:include personal
– Save the changes to the config file (you can close the Text Editor)You can now see that any exiting (if any) applications on your “Personal Menu” instantly show in the first layer of the menu
Optional:
Step 3- Add or remove entries to your “favourite apps” list:
Using a GUI:
Alternative 1: antiX Menu > Control Center > Last tab on the left > Last icon on the lower right (it’s the one that mentions the “menu”) You can achieve the same result by launching “menu_manager.sh” in the terminal or in the antiX menu “run” box. This will launch the menu manager application.
Click the second button on the window that pops up (“Personal”) > Choose if you wish to add or remove a favourite app to the list and it’s pretty straight forward from then on… For some reason, on my system, menu_manager fails to always work correctly, adding 2 extra random apps to the ~/personal config file.
Alternative 2: antiX Menu > Applications > AntiX > Fast Personal Menu Editor
It’s not so polished – it’s based on an old Toolbar Icon Manager script: you have to click a .desktop file in order for it to be added to the “Personal” list. It can only remove the last entry (i.e. you can select which application icon you want to remove) but it works great. I’ll probably rewrite it with the latest “python” routine that quickly lists the contents of .desktop files…Managing Personal entries Manually:
open, in your text editor menu-applications file: ex:geany ~/.icewm/menu-applications
copy any application you want and past it in the ~/.icewm/personal file (ex: open it withgeany ~/.icewm/personalNote: you don’t even need to update your menu, it updates instantly.
P.
- This topic was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by PPC.
- This topic was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by PPC.
- This topic was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by PPC.
Brian Masinick
Another thing I personally like to do is keep a set of applications that I frequently use directly accessible on the IceWM toolbar.
It’s easy to get “carried away” and put too many things on a toolbar, but in time, if you consider what you actually use,
you can put the every day stuff on the toolbar, certain things you may want access to on the desktop (if that’s your style; it isn’t mine),
and as PPC has already stated, you can organize or reorganize your menus either for your convenience or where you’d like to find your
favorite applications listed.Changing these things is not that difficult, even if you are not very familiar with it;
the easiest way to figure out the conventions is to actually look at the initial setup.
In it, you can see where most icons are located ( /usr/share/icons/papirus-antix/48×48/apps/ is where most of my chosen icons are located ).
Similarly most ordinary system images are located in the /usr/bin directory.I happen to download and maintain several of my own Web browser instances, so the browser images are found in my directory tree.
I can use icons from /usr/share/icons/papirus-antix/48×48/apps/ or from icons in the downloaded software in my directory; generally I use
the standard ones because they are nearly always in the same place.So with some thought, consideration for your own interests and needs, even a fairly simple window manager like IceWM is surprisingly powerful
and easy to modify. I’ve known this for a long time because I used IceWM as far back as the nineties on Linux or UNIX workstations and I
customized my own interfaces then. Even forgetting the specifics of what I did back then, it was easy to locate and reconfigure my system,
even new and different systems.The directory ~/.icewm is the starting point for your personal creations. I start by editing my toolbar file, and I often edit my preferences file.
The menu and the menu-applications are files I modify less often, plus some of our tools and packages configure these for us – and may sometimes alter or update them. It’s always possible to create alternatives and copies, saving them privately and reusing, replacing or removing them as you see fit.
The more you change things, the more it becomes your own, and you are in charge. When you’re starting out, save stuff in completely different directories, and save what you started with too; if you “mess up”, then it’s reasonably easy to put it back, and crucial to do so if you completely break something. So the first lessons are copies, backups, and alternatives; get your own practice well established and before you know it you can do whatever you want with the menus, toolbars, applications, and appearance.--
Brian MasinickBobC
Its not a good idea to edit your menu-applications, I don’t think.
Did you know you can add your personal menu and a myfavorites menu to your toolbar? Give it a try…
Dave
@PPC
Do all the window managers support this option?
If so do you feel like the top portion of the main menu could be a “pin-able”/”personal” section with the standard items (app-select, terminal, web browser, email, editor, etc) as default or “pre-pinned”/”personal” options?Computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening Windows. ~Author Unknown
Its not a good idea to edit your menu-applications
I agree Bob- but in my example, the menu-applications is opened just to provide an easy way to find what has to be pasted into the “personal” config file. User should copy from it, not cut text from it!!!
I used to recommend using app-select to find out what to add to the menu, but going through a text file that already has all the apps, localized and in the same syntax that we need to use in the menu saves a lot of time and effort…Do all the window managers support this option?
I think they do (but, there has to be a “personal” config file respecting each Window Manager’s menu syntax).
I just tested. To add the contents of the “personal” folder straight into Fluxbox’s menu can be acheived add this line (I recommend below app-select’s entry, at the top):
[include] (~/.fluxbox/personal)In JWM:
<Include>$HOME/.jwm/personal</Include>
(Note: JWM is the only WM that has to be reloaded, so users can see the change in the menu, in IceWM and FLuxbox, that happens instantly- as it should always be on a modern OS, right?)If you like this idea, to provide faster access to user preferred apps, I suggest something like my setup (with a separator between each point, except, perhaps, after app-select/rofi and between the default apps and the “personal” list):
1- app-select (or a rofi app launcher, on slower computers- it’s not so feature rich but it’s lightning fast, even on 20 year old computers)
2- “personal” contents
3- Default apps (the usual: Default Terminal, Default File Manager, Default Web Browser, Default Text Editor)
4- “Applications” sub folder (I renamed my “All applications“, after all everything listed in the menu is an “application”, right?) + the Refresh menu entry (I still advise it to run with gksu, or it’s useless for basic users that click that entry and realize it does nothing… if by change sudo password is not memorised by the system)
5- All the rest of the menu entries, ending in the “Exit” optionsI’m not sure everyone will like my setup – if you have lots of entries on the Personal menu, the top of the main menu would be off screen- that’s the single on good reason I found, UX related to have it as a separated sub-menu).
Important Edit:
@Dave – I just noticed that your Menu Editor script has problems dealign with 2 of my .desktop files from FT10 (one is the “Weather”), and always adds it to the personal file, when adding any other .desktop… Also, the script itself is localized but, the list of available apps is not…
I have a suggestion – that also could create a semi-self updating menu for icewm and fluxbox (but not in JWM): can’t the python script that generates the Applications menu (that works lightning fast, much faster than app-select or my bash script to list available apps, that I created for IceWM’s Toolbar Icon Manager) be adapted so it does not require the aplications-menu to be in a root folder? I don’t understand a thing about python, but there’s probably a way to do that, it seems so trivial… Even if there’s not – can we have a new version if the script that creates the list of available apps as a regular text file in the user’s Home? If we can do that, since it’s so fast I was thinking about this: every time users launch IceWM or Fluxbox menu, at the same time antiX would launch the script, updating the the applications menu. The hook up in apt would run exactly the same script, editing the config file in the users home. Even if the script takes 2-3 seconds to run, it’s about the same time users take to click the menu, click the (All) Applications sub-menu and then the desired “Category”- and the list would automagically update (note: jgmenu achieves that, instantly – it auto updates instantly, and yes, it even instantly shows appimages added to the menu, using that feature, available on most recently created appimages).
Having that python script would allow us to have an almost instant way to process all applications in the menu (and using the localized names)- great for making app-select and Toolbar Icon Manager way faster on slower machines…- This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by PPC.
- This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by PPC.
- This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by PPC.
Sorry, I misread.
@all – I forgot to list fast_personal_menu_editor on my OP, I corrected that. It’s basic, but it allows users to select a .desktop file to be added to the Personal list, and also remove the last entry from that list.
Currently, below the app-select/rofi entry on the top of my icewm menu I have this line:
prog "PINNED APPS (click here to manage them):" " " /usr/local/bin/fast_personal_menu_editor.shand yes, that entry does the same that the equivalent one does on FT10’s menu- allows you to add/remove (for now, in a very basic way) Favourites/pinned apps from your list, via GUI.
I wasn’t used to the default antiX GUI – now with my theme and my eddited icewm menu it’s almost as feature rich as my costumized jgmenu, from FT10 (it has a quick Search feature, using rofi, it allows me to manage my pinned apps via a GUI, the only thing it can’t do is automatically refresh the (All) Applications list…
Edit:
One very nice perk of adding applications to the first layer of the menu is that you can use shortcut keys automatically: for example- if you add “Brave Browser” to the first layer of the menu (and it’s the only entry there that starts with a “B”), to open it you can just press the “Win” key and then “B” (if you have more than one entry that starts with the same letter, the first entry with that letter will be selected- you can use the cursor keys to select the correct entry and press enter, when the correct option is selected)… hum… instant quick launch keys? Why have I never noticed that?P.
- This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by PPC.
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