What's Happening with Menu Management?

Using applications, configuring, problems
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ozboomer
Posts: 135
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 21:22
Location: Melbourne, Australia

What's Happening with Menu Management?

#1 Post by ozboomer »

Following Barry's announcement in 'News:27Aug05', I'd like to know if anything's happening with how menus are being managed across the different window managers.

For example I'm currently experimenting a little with FluxBox and all we have is v1.0.3 menu available as a DotPup on the wiki.

Seeing JWM's menu file is built in XML and there is some structure to how FluxBox menus are created, is there a program somewhere that converts between the two formats?

Even better, as I mentioned in my posting (which we can no longer access) back in March/April 2005, we could build our own 'definition files' for each window manager (rather than a separate program):

> 03/04/05 12:08:27 PM
> [...]
> How about we create a standard (our own) structured file
> that defines the menu structure of applications we want
> to use. Create programs that 'convert' our standard file
> format into a target window manager format (eg fvwm95 or
> jwm). This means we only have to maintain one 'structured
> file' and then build a program as new window managers
> come into use

...have we built something in a 'standard' Puppy format that will allow us to convert between any window manager format and our 'puppy format'? I've had a token look at /usr/sbin/fixmenus but that doesn't seem to do what I want/we need.

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MU
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#2 Post by MU »

Hi,

I see no difference in parsing an own file or the .jwmrc.

So in my wxB-Menue I read in .jwmrc at every restart. Like this I can be shure it is always up to date with the "Puppy-Stuff" in addition to the entrys you add manually with the menue-Editor.

So for Fluxbox you could write a script that runs when Fluxbox is restarted, which replaces the ".fluxboxrc" or similar (don't know how easy it is to add such a handler to fluxbox).

Mark

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ozboomer
Posts: 135
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 21:22
Location: Melbourne, Australia

#3 Post by ozboomer »

MU wrote:I see no difference in parsing an own file or the .jwmrc.

So in my wxB-Menue I read in .jwmrc at every restart.
Ok then... I'll guess that we are 'safe' in assuming the .jwmrc XML will be our 'standardized menu file' and we'll have to build a script for each window manager that gets called in 'startx' or maybe include something in .xinitrc to guarantee our menus are built correctly.

Ta.

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rarsa
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#4 Post by rarsa »

Funny, I went to bed yesterday thinking about this.

We started the discussion and then Barry made the anouncement (Aug 27, 2005). I stopped thinking about that, until yesterday that I realized that I didn't know what was that 'new standar way' of managin menus is.

I think that I missunderstood him. I know that we now have 'fixmenus' but that only works for entries that are already in the configuration files.

There was also de discussion about using the XDG standard which I think is the way to go. If we use XDG we don't need to worry about having 'markers' in the configuration files to insert menu entries.

Here is the thread:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.p ... sc&start=0

Let's continue the development. We have already more pieces of the puzzle than what we had when we started the thread. I am still wondering how my (scarse) time can be best used in puppy.

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