libxfce4menu with experimental merging support

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey,

On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:10:53 +0100
Jelle de Jong <jelledejong at powercraft.nl> wrote:

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> Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:55:21 +0100
> > Jelle de Jong <jelledejong at powercraft.nl> wrote:
> > 
> >> Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> >>> Hey guys,
> >>>
> >>> I've spent the last two days hacking on libxfce4menu because I had
> >>> nothing better to do and I wanted to see how difficult it would be
> >>> to implement menu merging. To sum things up: two commits, more
> >>> than 1400 changes and ... merging works!
> >>>
> >>> Since my Subversion installation was broken earlier today I
> >>> committed all of this to a git branch called 'merge-support'.
> >>> Here's the ChangeLog:
> >>>
> >>>   http://git.xfce.org/jannis/libxfce4menu/log/?h=merge-support&showmsg=1
> >>>
> >>> This won't make it into 4.6 but it's a nice proof-of-concept for
> >>> 4.8. I'll probably not implement it this way for 4.8 because I
> >>> have a more solid two-pass parser concept in mind for 4.8 which
> >>> will solve a lot of problems and workarounds with the
> >>> implementation in that git branch.
> >>>
> >>> It works and you can test it. I've also made a (bit too large)
> >>> demo video which you can download from here:
> >>>
> >>>   http://lunar-linux.org/~jannis/videos/xfce/libxfce4menu-merging-20090216.ogv
> >>>
> >>> In this video I'm using alacarte to customize my menu. Feel free
> >>> to test it, but keep in mind that this will not be part of 4.6
> >>> and thus you should rather test trunk ;)
> >>>
> >>> Cheers,
> >>> Jannis
> >> Looks good, will be a real pain killer for heavy menu user.
> >>
> >> Maybe you remember us talking about it at fosdem. But would it be
> >> possible to have a look at the possibility to make a virtual file
> >> system of the xdg .desktop menu and this nice customize menu
> >> feature and make it possible to (fuse) mount and browse it with
> >> thunar as normal file structure.
> > 
> > Of course that's possible. Instead of using FUSE though I'd
> > recommend to write a GVfs handler for the applications:// URI. Once
> > GVfs has landed in Thunar integration would be very smooth. 
> 
> Thanks, all true, but then it would not be desktop independent, it
> would be nice it it works for every desktop environment thats why I
> suggested using fuse. If its mounted in the normal file system like
> possible with sshfs, cifs etcetera, thunar would not see the different
> and the user can create gtk-bookmarks that show up in the shortcut
> list of thunar.

Well, if it was based on GVfs, Thunar wouldn't see the difference
either, except for the different URI scheme (which it shouldn't really
care about). Bookmarks and all that would also work.

But of course this wouldn't be entirely desktop independent.

> >> This way I don't have to use the panel menu, but it would be
> >> possible to use thunar and the side shortcuts to act as menu.
> >> Making the file manager the main part of the working environment.
> >>
> >> See the attached screenshots for a prototype mock up its not a
> >> virtual file system.
> > 
> > It might be interesting for some people but it doesn't sound like
> > something I'd implement in Xfce. It sounds more like a goodie or
> > something.
> 
> Does not need to be implemented strait into xfce, but xfce/openbox
> users are kind of the target group that would benefits for these extra
> features.

I have to admit that it doesn't sound too useful to me. I'd rather
improve the appfinder which should be the number one choice when it
comes to browsing installed applications.
 
> Are you interested in developing such mountable xdg desktop file
> system? 

Not really. I have too many things to work on already.

  - Jannis
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