How to add kde3.x apps to 4.3 start menu

[Duncan]

Ferdinand Smit posted on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:28:59 +0200 as excerpted:

>> Is there some easy way to make old apps like kile, digikam and so on
>> appear in kde-startmenu and/or lancelot?
> 
> You can add a xxx.desktop file to the .local/share/applications, but i
> do not know if this is the "official" way.

I always use kmenuedit ("Menu Editor" on the context/right-click menu on 
whatever menu widget), and create my own menu entry, here.  I've been 
doing that for years, probably since kde 3.1 or so.  (Before that I was 
on Mandrake, which at least at the time had its own menu editor setup, 
unifying the at the time unstandardized menus of kde, gnome, etc, into 
one.  However, that was kde 2 and gnome 1 time frame...)

In fact, since I recently uninstalled kde3, I've been thinking it would 
be a good time to delete my user's customizations and all the cruft that 
has built up over the years, and start over.  However, I'm not going to 
do that yet, as that will screw up all my khotkeys launcher shortcuts.  
But since khotkeys4 doesn't properly support multi-key hotkeys (bug 
#161009), I'm switching to non-kde xbindkeys for hotkey support.  When I 
get that finished (I have it installed and have been reading the 
documentation, the guile config option is far more flexible, but also far 
more complex, and it's taking time to absorb), I'll not have to worry 
about khotkeys menu linkages any more, and will delete them, then backup 
my user's menu config, and delete it.  I can then log back in and get the 
default system menu, and can start recustomizing if desired, from there.  
If I decide it's not worth the trouble and I want my old crufty menus 
back, I'll just restore from the backup.

Desktop entries and the menufiles built from them are now part of the 
freedesktop.org specs, of course, as are their locations and the 
variables that control them.  See:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/menu-spec

Here's a direct link to the latest version of the list of env vars and 
their meaning, along with defaults both system-wide and per-user:

http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s03.html

And here's where the menus are placed in reference to them:

http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/ar01s02.html

Here, with XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/config and XDG_DATA_HOME
=~/config/local/share, kmenuedit places the desktop files in
~/config/local/share/applications, and the menu itself in
~/config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu.  (If you can't tell, it 
irritates me to have the configuration in a hidden .dir, so I set mine to 
unhidden no-leading-dot locations.  With everything under ~/config and 
~/kde for the kde stuff, it doesn't clutter the home dir ls output /that/ 
much.)

Knowing that allows one to backup the data as appropriate, or to edit it 
directly using a plain text editor, if desired, instead of kmenuedit.

-- 
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

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