Changing Xfce 4.8 menu

With the new release of Xfce there’s a new system in place but there isn’t any interface included to edit the menu. This isn’t really a problem because now it just follows the freedektop specification and you are able to use other tools for the job like Alacarte menu editor. If you’re into it and don’t mind installing all the gnome dependencies atached to it you’ll be fine. If you want to do it the hardcore way i’ll try to tell you where to look.

Menu structure

First you’ll need to know where to locate the file that describes the structure of the menu that is shown. The default menu is located at /etc/xdg/menus/xfce-applications.menu and if you want to edit it you should copy it to ~/.config/menus/xfce-applications.menu. Now you can start editing it the way you want. By default there are all those categories specified that will load the corresponding applications and create the menus automatically, but you’re really into it it is probably possible to create a totally custom menu where you specify exactly everything you want.

For example what i wanted to change in my menu was simply remove the “Run Program…” from the top and those “Help” and “About Xfce”. Although this should be enough it caused some problems, because if we keep the include statement of “X-Xfce-Toplevel” at the beggining of the file it will still load those entries that i wanted to remove and now they will appear at random places in the menu. If we remove that include statement those launchers like “exo-terminal-emulator.desktop” or “exo-web-browser.desktop” won’t work.

Changing options for specific applications

So the previous problem can be solved if we remove the category “X-Xfce-Toplevel” from those exo-*.dektop files or by hiding the application we don’t want to see. Both of these options can be changed in the same place. Now the desktop entry specification comes into play. All of the launchers for the applications that appear in the menu are located under /usr/share/applications and if you want to change any of them just copy the relevant file you want to ~/.local/share/applications. Now you just need to open the file and edit the contents. The relevant options are “Categories=”, “Hidden=” and “NoDisplay=”. More details for what each option does go to Description on Desktop Menu Specification. Note that for a minimal accepted file the keys that are shown as required need to be present or weird things will happen.

This is how my menu looks now:

And this what i have in my ~/local/share/applications:

Relevant links i recommend:
Xfce Bug
Xfce Wiki
Desktop Menu Specification
Desktop Entry Specification

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