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

[Franklin Weng]

Hi Duncan,

2012/9/3 Duncan <1i5t5.duncan at cox.net>:
> 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. =:^)
>

It may be ordered by alphabetical order, or say, in unicode?  For
other languages like Chinese it seems to have an order too.

To find out the solution, I tried to edit the plasma init scripts to
create an SaL activity and assigned the categories I wanted to show in
EnabledEntries options, with the order I want.  However, when creating
a user and a whole new kde plasma-desktop-appletsrc file, the
EnabledEntries was written into it but the categories shown in the
desktop were still the very default ones - bookmarks, contacts, and
some other categories.  I just can't understand why.

BTW, in the EnabledEntries option, some categories used desktop file
like plasma-sal-office.desktop and some used a name I assigned in my
XDG menus file like SoundVideo/ .  Why didn't it just honor the
categories defined in the applications menu file like
kde4-applications.menu in /etc/xdg/menus and the customized menu files
in the home directory, but used another desktop instead?  I can't find
any document describing the behavior here...



Thanks,
Franklin
___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.