Re: How does Gnome populate its menus?

[Toralf Lund <toralf procaptura com>]

> I've been using Gnome for a few years, but I recently wanted to learn a
> little bit more about the guts of the system.  One thing I really want o
> fiddle with is the Gnome menus.  Can somebody explain to me how gnome
> populates it's menus?  I understand that there are .desktop files
> describing the menu items and their actions.  What I don't get is how
> gnome decides what directories to check to find these .desktop files.
GNOME 2 has a config file that tells it where to look for the .desktop 
files and how to assemble the menu based on them. On Red Hat systems, this 
file is called /etc/X11/desktop-menus/applications.menu. On a standard 
gnome build I think it's on a different location; 
/usr/share/gnome/vfolders/applications.vfolder-info or something like 
that. Or maybe the default setup has changed to Red Hat's conventions? 
(Look for applications.menu and applications.vfolder-info, and you should 
be able to figure it out.)


> Is there a way to make gnome look into a user's home directory for more
> .desktop files?
I guess you can set up the 
>  Is there a nice way to allow each user to customize
> his/her menu structure?  I LOVE GNOME.  I've even been able to convert
> my wife from a Windows environment to Gnome.  But, it sure seems easier
> in Windows to customize a user's menu than it does in Gnome.  That
> really hurts to say that.  Please help me figure out how Gnome does
> this.  Maybe, if I have the time and motivation, I will try to put
> together a little application that allows users to customize the menu
> just as easily as they can in Windows.
The issue of menu editing is discussed in a thread added to the GNOME 
mailing list after this post. Subject is "Problem Editing Menus"

- Toralf