idea: new menu editor for xfce

[Stephan Arts]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Christian M <bodiak at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
>  I'm pretty new here but I've used XFCE for about a year now.
>  It's really a great desktop environment and I would like to
>  contribute some code :)
>
>  Here is my idea:
>
>  project definition:
>  A new menu editor or an enhancement of the current one.
>  The software is able to create, organize and edit desktopfiles for xfce.
>  This way each user can costumize his system menu.
>
>  roadmap:
>  at first this program only manages the system menu.
>  later the menu system (and maybe the desktop icons)
>   can be completely transfered to the freedesktop standard(?).
>
>  how:
>  the program uses the desktop-files in the ~/.local/share/applications/
>  directory.
>  If a "external" (outside this working dir) desktop-file should be changed
>  the tool will simply copy the file to it's working dir.
>  As the used dir always has the highest priority
>  this will overwrite the settings of other files with the same name.
>
>  features (similiar to gnomes alacarte):
>  -edit menu entries
>  -create menu entries
>  --add "locations" like in alacarte
>  -show a list of the available menu entries
>  -activate/deactivate entries
>  -delete costum entries
>  -show a list of the available and used categories
>
>  development:
>  I would like to use glade and anjunta for coding as this handles the
>  gtk code quite nicely and keeps it away from the other code.
>
>  I'm a bit new to programming in C but I would like to give it a try.
>
>  What do you think? Any recommendations?

It is great that you want to write a new menu-editor. I would like to
point out to you that xfce 4.6 will come with a completely new menu
implementation. This makes the current menu-editor unusable and thus
obsolete.

Please take a look at libxfce4menu, it is the current backend library
which 'reads' the menu-files.

-
Stephan