Is it to change the categories order in the Search and Launch activity?

[Duncan]

Franklin Weng posted on Sun, 02 Sep 2012 23:35:49 +0800 as excerpted:

> In the [Search and Launch] activity we can choose to enable if a
> categories should show on the desktop or not.  But do we have any way
> to change the order on the desktop?  For example, I'd like to make the
> first category, in the upper-left corner, be Office instead of
> Internet.  I can't find a way to change the order, either on google or
> on KDE user or techbase wiki.

> KDE 4.9.0 (on kubuntu 12.04

While I don't normally use Search & Launch, preferring the default 
desktop even on my netbook, I just switched to it temporarily (also on 
4.9.0, gentoo) to check, and...

You appear to be correct.  There's an option to toggle various categories 
on and off, but no (direct at least) way to reorder them.

However, it's worth noting that, at least here, they appear to be in 
alphabetical order.  That's a useful clue to a way to do it indirectly, 
tho I didn't actually try it to be sure.

Try this.  Open kmenuedit and rename Office to something like 0ffice 
(zero instead of capital "o").  If I'm correct, that'll put it first, 
since numbers should parse before letters.

There's at least two caveats, however.  (1) kmenuedit will normally only 
change your user's menu, not the entire system, so other users will still 
have the usual names and order.  This could be good or bad, depending... 

But perhaps more of an issue, (2) You'll likely find that since you only 
edited your own menu, the system knows nothing about it, and installation 
of new packages with entries that appear in the renamed menu will likely 
recreate the old one again, and you'll have to open up kmenuedit again 
and move it to where it belongs.  Similarly, if you uninstall something, 
the menu entry may remain, since it's modified from the default and thus 
in your user config, not the system config, where the uninstall would 
normally uninstall the entry as well.

At least that's what I found back when I used to HEAVILY edit my own 
menus.  These days I leave them pretty much alone as I have a 
configurable hotkey launcher setup[1] that I use for anything I regularly 
open, and I tend to use krunner if I know the name but don't run 
something enough to have created a hotkey for it, so the only time I 
actually use the kickoff menu is when I'm looking for something I don't 
use often enough to even know its name.  As such, I decided I don't see 
the menus often enough to be worth the hassle of maintaining the 
differences between my customized version and the default system 
version.  So I've not actually fiddled with editing anything lately, and 
it may well be that they figured out how to auto-synchronize the 
differences between the system version and a user's customized version.  
So #2 may or may not actually happen any more.


So anyway, the categories appear to be alphabetically arranged.  So by 
editing the category names in kmenuedit, you should be able to change the 
order.  But you may or may not find it worth the trouble.  YMMV, as they 
say.

Meanwhile, tying up a loose end, it DOES appear that the order of the 
favorites section can be changed.  At least dragging and dropping 
favorites icons into a different order seemed to stick.  But I didn't 
restart kde or plasma-desktop or switch to a new activity and back to be 
sure, I just tried it, then switched back to my normal default desktop.

---
[1] My hotkey launcher setup: Basically a couple bash scripts, created 
when kde4's khotkeys broke the multi-key hotkey sequences that I used to 
use in kde3's khotkeys.  kde4's khotkeys is still broken, BTW, apparently 
because qt4 is missing hotkey functionality that qt3 had, but qt5 has it, 
I'm told, so kde frameworks aka kde5 should hopefully fix it. =:^)

-- 
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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