how to show menus as menus in the application laucher of the panel?

[Duncan]

hw posted on Sun, 27 Feb 2022 02:22:54 +0100 as excerpted:

> how do you make it so that menus in the starter of the panel show as
> menus as they used to?  I thought the menu definitions must have become
> messed up but kmenuedit still shows them as menus as they are supposed
> to show.  I added my own menus and submenus, and of course I want them
> to show as menus and submenus and not everything in a chaotic list. 
> Somehow the panel/starter must have been made worse.

Easiest:  Context (aka right) click on the kickoff button and select "show 
alternatives".  Select "Application Menu".  (This of course assumes your 
distro has it installed.)

Alternative: Add widgets (there's several ways to get to that, including 
the desktop context menu), set the category to application launchers, make 
your selection and drag it to a panel or desktop as desired.


Third party alternative:  Choose and configure your own third-party 
launcher.

Back in the kde3 era I had configured chained hotkeys to launch all my 
frequently used apps.  Unfortunately kde's chained-hotkey implementation 
broke with kde4 (they said it was qt that broke it, but one could imagine 
they'd have either gotten it fixed or worked around it, only I guess it 
wasn't important enough to keep working user configurations working), and 
I had to come up with my own solution using scripting, etc.

After trying a few different things including a heavily bash-scripted 
solution of my own, I ended up using pdmenu as my base, along with kde/
plasma's single-key hotkey launcher to trigger it.  pdmenu is a terminal-
based menu program, so I run it in konsole.  Plasma's hotkey launches 
konsole running pdmenu with my initial menu, with choices that trigger a 
second menu. (pdmenu has submenus but I preferred to just launch another 
konsole window with another pdmenu instance with the submenu.)

The end result is a chain of maybe 3-4, sometimes 5, sequential hotkeys, 
the first of which launches the main menu, additional ones launching 
submenus, until the last launches my app of choice.

I don't have everything in the application menu setup in that menu tree, 
but it has all the apps I use often enough to bother, plus entries that 
launch commonly used scripts that don't have application menu entries, 
plus entries for all the websites I visit frequently enough to bother, 
etc.

Then I configured a konsole profile with a 100% transparent background, no 
toolbars/tabbars, etc, and setup a window rule so those konsole windows (I 
put a specific unusual character in the title and match it so it doesn't 
match normal konsole windows) are borderless, etc.  The result is, 
visually a bare (text) menu popup, in my preferred color, with the rest of 
the konsole window invisible so as to preserve the illusion that it's a 
bare popup menu. =:^)

The best thing is that because it's third party, when I upgraded from kde/
plasma4 to kde/plasma5, my custom chained-hotkey menus continued to work!  
If I switch to something other than kde/plasma, they'll still work, with 
whatever terminal replacing konsole, as long as I can configure at least 
one single hotkey as the initial menu launcher.  (Of course in X there's 
all sorts of hotkey solutions available.  Wayland's higher security means 
hotkey solutions have to cooperate with the compositor which is normally 
the only thing able to see and mediate global hotkeys on wayland, but 
there are ways around that too as long as you are suitable determined and 
have root available to configure things like input device permissions if 
necessary.)

Similarly, because pdmenu is a terminal app, switching from xorg to 
wayland wasn't an issue.  As long as I can run some sort of terminal I 
should be good.  (Tho of course if I migrated to a terminal without 
konsole's features and a compositor without kwin's window-rules features, 
it'd probably show up as a much uglier terminal window with the usual 
borders, etc.  But it'd still be 100% functional, and presumably whatever 
I migrated to would have its own features I could use for the visuals, 
instead.)

-- 
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