Arch Linux

Xyne

Administrator/PM

Registered: 2008-08-03

Posts: 6,963

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ObDesktopLauncher

I wrote a little script to create an Openbox pipe menu for *.desktop files. This has probably been done before but maybe not exactly like this. It probably took about as long to write as it would have taken to search for an equivalent script so I'm not really fussed if someone posts a link to something similar.

Anyway, the main menu contains two sub-menus. The first lists all of the applications by name in alphabetical order. The second lists all of the categories in alphabetical order and each category opens a sub-menu that lists all of the applications that it contains.

This is mostly to provide a quick overview of desktop files to give you an idea of what's on your system (I tend to discover apps occasionally that have been installed alongside others). The menu can feel a bit cluttered due to some files specifying multiple categories which no other application uses. This creates several single-application categories and many redundancies.

ObDesktopLauncher takes 1 argument: an escaped command string to launch terminal-only applications, e.g. "obdesktoplauncher 'urxvtc -e'".  If this argument is not given, it defaults to "$TERM -e".

The script is here:
http://xyne.archlinux.ca/files/obdesktoplauncher

As usual, if there's enough interest in this I'll package it and add it to my repo and the AUR.

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