[kde-linux] Retain Favorites menu through upgrade to 4.7

[Duncan]

Dale posted on Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:41:49 -0600 as excerpted:

> Maybe Duncan will have some ideas on this.

I'm not sure whether the following will help much or not.  It's more a 
bunch of semi-related thoughts and comments on the general idea, since I 
rarely use the kickoff menu and thus it's one of the few bits of kde that 
I've only very lightly customized.  I don't believe I've customized 
Favorites at all, so obviously wouldn't know if the customizations 
survived upgrades here or not.

I thought Internet Favorites, aka bookmarks, at first.  I've certainly 
never lost them, even in the upgrade from 3.x.  Actually, I think some of 
them might even be from kde2 era!

Then when I realized it wasn't that, I immediately thought of the panel 
in dolphin, etc, but that's Places, not Favorites.

But for the kickoff menu, kickoffrc does sound like the place to look.

I've never really customized it tho (as I said), since I use a scripted 
hotkey setup I devised in the switch to kde4 when khotkeys lost the 
proper multikey support that it had in kde3, for launching all my 
commonly used apps.  So I only rarely use kickoff and haven't customized 
it hardly at all.

I'd do some testing, but I just finished upgrading to 4.7.90 aka 4.8-
beta2, here, and am rather too tired to reason the tests out effectively.
Maybe when I wake up.


But I can leave you with this.  *.desktop files are the freedesktop.org 
standard for setting up menu entries, etc.  KDE uses them for services 
that the user doesn't start directly, too, tho I'm not sure if that's 
part of or an extension of the freedesktop.org standard.  (A services 
example would be the ghns, get-hot-new-stuff, service, which is the 
integration with kde-look for downloading new wallpapers, plasmoids, 
etc... that's a service described by one or more *.desktop files among 
other things, available as part of a number of kde apps, not an 
individual app to be run separately or have its own menu item).

Typically, the format is the usual ini-file-format, [sections] in 
brackets, entry=value pairs, # starts a comment and blank lines ignored.  
They typically consist of title and description lines, both translated 
into dozens of different languages, plus the functional part that says 
what executable to run for a menu item, or library to load for a service, 
etc, and often a number of additional lines of optional information.

So a reference to firefox.desktop probably refers to the menu item, as 
created by the firefox.desktop file as it'd be found in /usr/share/apps 
or some such (too tired to check specifics ATM).

That should give you some idea what those *.desktop entries refer to, 
anyway.  You can equery belongs firefox.desktop to find the package 
(probably firefox) and system path it's installed in.  The other 
*.desktop references should then be easy enough to find, hanging out in 
either that area in system, or in the parallel homedir location, 
/usr/share/apps and $KDEHOME/share/apps ($KDEHOME defaults to ~/.kde if 
the variable isn't set) and the XDG parallel under ~/.config or ~/.local, 
IDR which.

That should be enough to get somewhere with, I think/hope.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman