antiX-forum

http://code.google.com/p/marchfluxmenu/

Note that this is for fluxbox.

The lack of auto generating and crappy generated menus is a real problem in antiX. I have not tested this yet and will not have time too for awhile as I am totally overwhelmed with school. I am posting this here hoping someone else is willing to test it for possible inclusion (with anti's approval) into antiX at some point.

There probably won't be time to test and integrate this into the next version unless anticapitalista is willing to delay it for this.

Marchfluxmenu is an attempt to have the fluxbox menu emulate the Gnome (or XFCE) menu, in both looks and functionality. It first generates a fluxbox menu for the current user from all the valid .desktop files found in /usr/share/applications/ The menu entries are categorized in a similar way as Gnome menu, viz as Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet, etc etc. The program then uses a daemon like script (mfmdaemon) to watch for changes in the directory /usr/share/applications/ If a new .desktop file is added/removed (for installation/removal of a package), the fluxbox menu auto-refreshes to reflect the change! You can also make changes manually to the menu items (NOT the submenu names themselves, yet!). They won't be lost while refreshing the menu.

I try not to advocate adding things to antiX (we want to keep it lightweight) unless there are usability issues. This is an example of something that may help usability.

anticapitalista, I would definitely appreciate a reply to this when you read it so I know I am not just talking to myself.

I just tried it and it works.
It produces a much better fluxbox menu than other auto-generated menu makers.
But it doesn't include any of the MEPIS/antiX apps and some others.

I'll look at it more when I come back.

From what their description says you can add those manually and they will not be removed. I'm not sure of the specifics.

I tried the March Flux Menu app last night and couldn't get it to do much, but that's probably down to my incompetence more than anything else. Anything that makes the Flux menu easier to work with has gotta be worth checking out anyway, and glad to see that you've had some success with it anti.

On a "Menu related" note, you may also want to check out this little app. It doesn't generate menus, but it certainly makes working with them a lot easier. It's a Menu Editor for Flux and it works really well. Very similar to obmenu, but far more user friendly and intuitive. Also has the ability to add icons to the each menu item if so desired.

Anyway, that's about it. Hope your break was a good one anti.

Before AntiX, I used to create menus for fluxbox with menumaker.

http://menumaker.sourceforge.net/

It was small and worked well. Have not tried it with AntiX since I haven't added many apps to what's included and the method built into AntiX for adding to the menu works well enough for me since I haven't added many apps.
Just another option if a menu generator is being considered.

I like menumaker (use it with Openbox a lot) but isn't it better at producing menus "from scratch" as it were? A great place to start from for sure, but it would get rid of the extra antiX stuff, so i guess you'd have to save the antiX bits then add afterwards?

Great little app though, and you've just reminded me that i need to get it onto this machine that i'm using at the moment.

The idea is that the menus would be auto generated for the user. Making my own menus is a waste of time for me. My operating system should make me more productive. So if something isn't there I just use the terminal (command &).

Urban wrote:The idea is that the menus would be auto generated for the user. Making my own menus is a waste of time for me. My operating system should make me more productive. So if something isn't there I just use the terminal (command &).

I agree Urban, and it's the one thing i don't like about minimal window managers like flux/openbox etc. Something that automatically updated menus would be really great, but only as long as it had the level of flexibility that allowed the user to keep/add their own menu parts.

Menumaker is cool, but having to manually update everytime you add a program etc, can be a real hassle. If MarchFluxMenu can be made to update, yet keep certain parts of the menu that the user chooses, it would be perfect for the job.

I just tried this mfm to see how it works and all I got for a menu was:

Fluxbox default menu
xterm
Restart
Exit

That's it! What am I missing here? I know I screwed something up somewhere.

eriefisher

eriefisher - that's exactly what happened to me when i tried mfm, but apparently both anti & Urban have used it and it worked OK??? I didn't have time to find out why it didn't work properly, too busy messing about with conky. But it's on my "ToDo" list.

Not a big deal because I have built my menu by hand but it would be nice to figure it out for future users.

eriefisher

On the menu topic:
Found this while surfing the web:

Convert fluxbox menu file to icewm
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/f/topic-3-35-9127-0.html

may or may not be any use?

Wow! This would go perfect with this menu generating tool. If we could just edit whatever the script is to automatically run the fluxbox->icewm tool every time the fluxbox menu was updated the menus would be synced between the WMs.

My workaround to the FB menu problem (incomplete, never updataed) was to add an entry "All applications" in the top section, and to point it to /usr/share/applications.

Very effective for me--and about how much time I felt like devoting to it.