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Lxpanel: make terminal programs start from the menu
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disciple

Joined: 20 May 2006
Posts: 6199
Location: Auckland, New Zealand

Posted: Sun 24 Jun 2012, 05:29 Post_subject:

Lxpanel: make terminal programs start from the menu
Sub_title: How to configure lxpanel so Terminal=true in .desktop file is respected

I've been using lxpanelx for a while now. Anything like this is more bloated that I would prefer, but I recently upgraded to more ram, so it isn't a real issue, although I don't expect I'll use it long term.
Lxpanelx is a very nice fork of lxpanel with a bunch of extra features like being able to rearrange programs in the taskbar. It sounds like its features will get merged back into the main lxpanel, which would be good...

Anyway, sometimes command-line programs provide .desktop files so they can be available in the menu. These include this property, to tell programs like lxpanel that they need to be launched in a terminal emulator:

Code:

Terminal=true

Examples of programs with this include htop (process manager), R (statistics program) and Octave (maths program; matlab alternative).
I'm not sure, but I suspect some of the panels and window managers commonly used in Puppy like JWM don't respect this property, in which case when people package programs like this for Puppy they probably edit the .desktop files to start the programme in rxvt or something.

Lxpanel(x) does respect this property, but I was having trouble figuring out what to specify in the settings to get it to work - a terminal window would flash up for a fraction of a second and then close.
It was partly confusing because in the setting for file manager I need to put this for the "Directory Menu" plugin to be able to open directories:

Code:

rox %s

So I thought maybe I needed to include %s in the setting for terminal emulator. But it turns out that I don't.
This didn't work:

Code:

urxvt -e

Starting lxpanel from a terminal I found that there were no error messages or anything produced.
This gave me a terminal window that just said "urxvt: unable to execute child":

Code:

urxvt -hold -e

I came somebody who suggested to use this:

Code:

urxvt -e bash -c

and said

Quote:

My experience is, that "urxvt -e" can't execute shell scripts.

Now, it doesn't actually seem to be anything to do with shell scripts, because some of the programs that wouldn't work for me are not shell scripts, and there are reports that some shell scripts work anyway. On the other hand, it does seem to be something to do with the fact that it is being called by the panel. For example, if I run something like this in a terminal it works as expected:

Code:

urxvt -e octave

Anyway, the suggested command for the lxpanel setting works.
This also works, if you'd prefer the terminal to remain open after you exit the program:

Code:

urxvt -hold -e bash -c

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