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

[Duncan]

hw posted on Sun, 27 Feb 2022 17:34:17 +0100 as excerpted:

> On Sun, 2022-02-27 at 08:24 +0000, Duncan wrote:
>> 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.)
> 
> Right click doesn't work with wayland.

??  As I said in a reply to a different thread, it's working fine here, 
kde-frameworks and plasma as live-git-master running kwin_wayland as the 
compositor, tho it has been working for most of the year-plus I've been on 
wayland (it was buggy for the initial months due to general wayland menu 
problems), so I'd expect it to be working in most releases within the year 
as well.

If it matters I'm using a touchpad, with the touchpad config set to right-
click on two-finger-touch (three-finger for middle-click), but if it's 
working there I don't know how out wouldn't be with the more common mouse, 
unless it's disabled for some reason in your config.

>> 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.
> 
> You mean the root window ("background" since wayland apparently doesn't
> have a root window anymore)?  The background is covered with windows, so
> that menu is not accessible.  And I don't understand what you mean by
> "desktop".  A GUI is no more than a way to display programs in such a
> way that they can be had on the same display with convenient ways to
> switch between them.  A "background" basically doesn't exist, and there
> is no "desktop".  I don't understand what "desktop environment" is
> supposed to be, either, there is no such thing.

The plasma background when no other open windows are displayed, 
traditionally called the desktop.

>> Third party alternative:  Choose and configure your own third-party
>> launcher.
>> [...]
>> After trying a few different things including a heavily bash-scripted
>> solution of my own, I ended up using pdmenu as my base,
>> [...]
> 
> Hm, pdmenu isn't in Fedora.  Maybe mc might work?  Maybe I need to go
> back to fvwm --- but then I'd be stuck with X11.

As I said I actually used my own scripted setup to display the text menu 
in konsole for some years (basically all of kde4 and kde5 until I found 
pdmenu quite recently).  So pdmenu isn't /required/.  pdmenu just makes 
things easier, and because it's not invoking a bunch of separate programs 
from the shell to actually parse and display the menu as the script does, 
just pdmenu, performance is better (it displays faster).

Here's the pdmenu homepage.  It says it's in Debian (and it's in gentoo as 
that's where I am), and there's a link to opensuse rpms for it and for 
centos, tho those appear to be a bit dated (release 1.3.2, I have live-git 
installed on gentoo but current release on gentoo is 1.3.6).  Plus of 
course sources if you wish/need to build it.

http://joeyh.name/code/pdmenu/

And rpmfind.net looks like it has 1.3.4 packages for OpenMandriva.

I'm guessing at least one of the rpms will work, tho you might have to 
force it.  If not, building should be reasonably easy.  Deps are minimal, 
slang, optionally gpm and gettext.  (Of course on most binary distros for 
libs you'll need the -devel packages too, and you'll need a build chain, 
say gcc and friends (make, possibly autotools or cmake, etc), if you don't 
have one installed.)

Alternatively, for the bash scripts, assuming you're bash literate, I can 
mail you my scripts, the hotkey-lookup file, and a couple sample menus and 
etc I used, and you can hack them if necessary to work on your system.  I 
still have them archived as I figure if something happens to pdmenu it'll 
be easier to start with what I had working before than to hack it up from 
scratch again.

-- 
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