Back in the day when I was using openSUSE and KDE3 I really loved the way the menu entries were organized into submenus. (For example: the Multimedia menu used to have the following submenus: Audio, TV, Video, etc.)
I’ve been using neither openSUSE nor KDE3 for more than a year (switched to Arch + KDE4). Not that I have anything against openSUSE. On the contrary, I think it’s a fantastic distro, but the time came when I needed to move on (going rolling release was what finally sold Arch to me).
However, I have taken with me many of the things I learned to love on Suse. One of them was the menu’s layout, which for me works better that vanilla kde’s.
What I would like to know is:
If that menu layout was something from KDE3 that got lost in the move to KDE4, or something SUSE added.
Which Suse package provides the layout (the default menu layout is given by menu files on /etc/xdg). I would like to take a look and copy it to my Arch install.
/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu is in desktop-data-openSUSE
/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu.kde4 is in kdelibs4
/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu.kde is in kdelibs3
But copying /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu to Arch might not produce the same menus, because the desktop files in /usr/share/applications don’t necessarely use the same categories. The “Categories” key in .desktop file has to match one (or more) <Category>…</Category> entries in /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu in order for the menu entry to appear.
BTW this file would be overwritten pretty soon on Arch. You should put it somewhere else and set the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to point to its location. More precisely, if you use ( for example) /usr/local/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu, you would set XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/usr/local/etc/xdg (the default is, as you noticed, /etc/xdg). Similarly you can change the default location of the menu files (.desktop files) by changing the value of XDG_DATA_DIRS (default is /usr/share:/usr/local/share ) .
OP, I had the same reaction as you and briefly investigated how easy it might be to custom configure the KDE menus.
I came across the “somewhat recommended” KDE Menu Editor, but after reading the docs decided at least for me it was likely more difficult than it was worth and would require considerable time to master.
Still, like most tools, it’s likely the preferred method to at least guide the User hopefully preventing common mistakes, possibly imposing proper structure and syntax.
>
> Back in the day when I was using openSUSE and KDE3 I really loved the
> way the menu entries were organized into submenus. (For example: the
> Multimedia menu used to have the following submenus: Audio, TV, Video,
> etc.)
>
> I’ve been using neither openSUSE nor KDE3 for more than a year
> (switched to Arch + KDE4). Not that I have anything against openSUSE. On
> the contrary, I think it’s a fantastic distro, but the time came when I
> needed to move on (going rolling release was what finally sold Arch to
> me).
>
> However, I have taken with me many of the things I learned to love on
> Suse. One of them was the menu’s layout, which for me works better that
> vanilla kde’s.
>
> What I would like to know is:
>
> 1) If that menu layout was something from KDE3 that got lost in the
> move to KDE4, or something SUSE added.
>
> 2) Which Suse package provides the layout (the default menu layout is
> given by menu files on /etc/xdg). I would like to take a look and copy
> it to my Arch install.
Did you try switching the Kickoff menu to the classic view? That got me
pretty much the KDE3 menu tree/editor. If your issue is with the other
menus, your out of my experience - I learned long ago to adapt to whatever
menu layout was thrown out to me rather than a never ending task of
reverting to previous styles