Editing global KDE 3.5x Menu
 

Since the new Menu formats were introduced in KDE (back in 3.something) I haven't been able to edit my menus. It's making duplicates, deleting things I don't want it to, having items show up in the editor but not in the KMenu, etc, etc... really messed up. (I eventually just reset my menu back to the defaults and walked away).

Now, back in the older versions there was some trick you could do to symbolically link your menu to the global menu and everything was editable through KMenuEdit and worked great, but with the new structure I don't know how to set this up.

Does anyone know what I have to link to what in order to get this to work or if it's even possible? Now that it's broken up into seperate menu files across x number of directories I've become totally lost. And until they put in a global menu editor or fix the current design I'm going to need this workaround. As it is now, I avoid the KMenu as much as possible, but it seems silly that I can't use what is "supposed" to be the launching place of all my apps. I would really like to get this fixed up.

Did you tried the control center ? I think I saw editing there.

Well I did a little research into this and I have more information (though still no answer). In KDE 3.2 the menu standards went to the freedesktop standards. While it's nice to have standards, this went from a system where it was one menu (stored in your local dir that was generated from a global) to a multi-menu system. What I've gathered so far is that this menu structure uses 3 file types to define the menu split us thusly:

(according to the KDE site, for KDE):
.menu is stored in 2 global and 1 local location
.desktop is stored in 3 global and 1 local location
.directoy is stored in 3 global and 1 local location

This unfortunately means that the system is *expecting* local AND global files and is reading from a variety of locations. This means that as far as I know there is no "linking" trick I can do. However, what is happening on my (and apparently other) people's systems is that duplicate names are going into the menus (some sort of global vs. local thing) and we're losing menu entries, directories, etc. As I mentioned before, I basically stopped using the menu as much as possible until this gets resolved. However, given this was a change in 3.2 and it's still a problem in 3.5x there must be a workaround by now!

The only other thing I can possibly do is edit all (let's count 'em) 11 locations by hand (and there's a lot of files in each location). This is a lot of hassle just to get my start menu (kmenu) working!

Does anyone have a better solution for this? Are there any utilities around that I can replace KMenuEdit with? Is there a possible directory linking solution?

The only thing that I can think of off the top of my head is that since I don't use gnome I can move all the global locations for each file type into a single global location. Then I could *attempt* to link my local dirs to the global dir I've specified. Though honestly I don't know what would happen if I did that. (And that's why I always make backups first. ;) )