Edit your menus

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Osiris

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Manage your E17 menus

Enlightenment E17 is one of those window managers that once you use you won't want to leave behind. Not only does it offer plenty of eye candy, it does so without sacrificing speed and usability (for a more in-depth introduction, take a look at my article “Get to know Linux: Enlightenment“). Now, to be really usable a window manager needs to have a simple means to edit menus. Without the means to do this task you are stuck with a Windows-like menu where you have next to no control over the contents. Unfortunately, E17 does not yet have a mechanism to alter the Main menu. The favorites menu, however, is a place where you can play to your hearts content.
With many window managers you are stuck editing flat-text files to add or remove contents. This is certainly the case with E16. Fortunately E17 has a very easy to use tool to edit the Favorites menu. The only hitch is knowing what tool to use and where to add the apps. Without understanding your tools and targets, this can get a bit tricky. That's where Ghacks comes in. In this article you will learn how to add to your Favorites menu and configure your Main menu.
Difference between the menus
The first thing you must know is what menus you have to choose from. There are two primary menus in E17: The Main menu and the Favorites menu. The Main menu is the menu you see when you either click the “E” button on your main shelf or left-click any empty space on the desktop. This menu, as stated earlier, it not editable (unless you are willing to do some hacking of .c files). NOTE: There is much discussion of this subject and hopefully a tool will be created to allow the editing of the Main menu.
The other menu is the Favorites menu. This menu is a user-configurable menu that allows you to easily add and remove applications. This menu is accessed by right-clicking an empty spot on the desktop.
Now, let's see what we can do with these menus.

Manage your E17 menus




Edit your GNOME menus

Recently I instructed you how to “Manage your E17 menus“. In that article you saw how easy it was to add to the E17 favorites menu and handle some of the configuration options for the Main menu. The surprising issue was that the Main menu could not be edited (at least not with some serious pain, suffering, and confusion).
In this article I am going to show you how to edit/manage your GNOME menus. This tasks in the GNOME desktop is actually much easier than it is in E17, plus you have the added bonus of actually being able to edit the “Main” menus. This article will illustrate this task with the help of Ubuntu 9.04 and GNOME 2.26.1.




Editing your KDE menus

So far I have helped you to “Manage your E17 menus” and to “Edit your GNOME menus.” Now it is time to give KDE some love. I admit that I haven't given KDE much attention here. The reason for that is mostly because KDE 4.x has been mostly buggy and often times painfully slow. But the KDE team is slowly working the bugs out of the desktop and it is turning into something that could easily help the new user make the leap from Windows to Linux.
Aside from helping new users, KDE does have a lot to offer. And like the GNOME desktop, the KDE menu can be fine tuned to meet your needs. The KDE menu editor is a bit more powerful than GNOME's Alacarte. With this editor you can quite literally move EVERYTHING around in your menu as well as add and remove items.
 
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