File/Folder to Edit the "Start" Menu?
 

I am used to the Windows 7 desktop. There, if I want to rearrange the Start menu, I can drag and drop (and delete) items right in the menu, or I can open folders where the Start menu icons are located, and in those folders I can rearrange, edit, add, and delete.

I would like to do major surgery to the arrangement of icons in the Menu on Linux Mint MATE 18. I assume the information underlying that menu must be in a file or folder somewhere. But (a) where? and (b) is it user-editable?

I ask because I started dragging things around in the MATE Menu, but it really does not seem to be designed for much of that. I tried Alacarte and some alternate menu approaches, but we are still miles from home. And then there's the prospect of having to do it all over again if something happens to this installation.

The directories(your user only)(all users)

contain desktop files that you can edit in a text editor, thereby altering the gnome menus.

raywood, linux application menus are a little tricky to edit.
esp. on mint mate, which is a ligtweight distro, and therefore probably doesn't come with a gui to do that.
there used to be lxmenu, a weird java app that was able to do it.
i don't know if alacarte can do it, which is made for the xfce desktop iirc.
someone should crawl into the menu specifications and see what can be done.
the only way i can think of is to copy all files from /usr/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications, edit those you want to hide to set "Hidden=True".
or maybe you can tell mate panel to use a custom menu file, which you then would have to create. which i don't know how.

on a sidenote, i have long given up on this.
i have
3) a custom menu which contains only a few select entries (openbox)
4) a so-called app menu which i want to contain an entry for every app installed (doesn't work out that way either)
2) a run utility with tab-completion
1) hotkeys

You can edit .desktop files with any text editor such as nano or gedit.

Maybe also nice to change the theme as well?

Have a look here:
http://mate-desktop.com/themes/

Now you can use MenuLibre to modify the menu entries.
Link: https://smdavis.us/projects/menulibre/

good!
i hope it works for op.

Mint is using MenuLibre as their default menu editor for all Mint versions.

Even Mint KDE?

Thanks, all, for the replies.

MenuLibre isn't default in Mint 18 MATE. I installed and ran it. It seems to be more of a launcher than an editor. No real improvement over the built-in editor.

I looked at those three folders, viewed a few files, didn't get any clear sense of what I would edit to rearrange the menu structure.

Is there a launcher or other tool (Synapse? Docky?) that could be configured to function as a Start menu? I'd include, in it, a link to the default menu and search tool, so that I would have that as a route to the programs not represented in the launcher.

I use Cairo as my software- and document-launching dock. It takes a wee bit of setting up, but once it's going it's great.

The Mate equivalent to Alacarte is called Mozo.
http://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/mozo

This is helpful. It appears these folders mostly contain (a) MIME-related files, apparently indicating which apps will appear in the right-click context menu for a given file type and (b) .desktop files, containing information to help the specified app (e.g., banshee.desktop) open a file. This seems comparable to the individual shortcut (.lnk) files that open programs in the Windows Start menu.

What I am missing is the file that contains information on where a given Menu icon will appear. For example, Banshee appears in the Menu > Sound & Video category. Is there a file I could edit to make it appear, instead, in a new Multimedia category?

raywood, are you sure you're using MenuLibre correctly? The idea is to use it to modify the location of application launchers within your menu; you launch it, move launchers into the categories you want (and create new categories as needed). Isn't that what you are asking for? It's in no way meant to be a launcher itself.

To your second question - for a launcher - I recommend Plank. It's simple and effective. Maybe too simple, but it's probably worth a look.

notKlaatu -- thanks for your reply. I don't remember, now, what happened within MenuLibre, to make me compare it to a launcher. But you're right -- it is not that. Within MenuLibre, I was puzzled that it seemed to contain categories (e.g., Sundry) that appeared to be marked for display, and yet were not actually displaying in my menu.

The larger concern, whether using MenuLibra, Alacarte, or Mozo, was that I wished for more freedom to edit the menu and its submenus. I was asking for the locations of the files that control the menu's contents and structure in hopes that, as in Windows, I would be able to move or copy an entire set of application launchers to a different menu branch. This webpage offers a picture approximating what I'm trying to achieve.