Saturday, November 15, 2008

Editing the Menu on Fluxbox

Fluxbox is growing in popularity as a lightweight alternative window manager, and as such, many new users are switching to us. Many are turned off, however, by the fact that you have to edit your menus by hand. I can't tell you the number of times I've been interuppted from my game of frozen bubble to answer fluxbox menu editing questions on irc or here. So for the sake of my gaming, I decided to write a tutorial!

Here is what you need to do:
1)Install Fluxbox (duh)
2)Either open up a shell (konsole, xterm, Eterm, etc.) and type:
 
Code:
vi ~/.fluxbox/menu
replacing vi with your favorite editor
OR
Open '~/.fluxbox/menu' with your favorite WYSIWYG editor
3)The file might seem a bit intimidating at first, but it's really not that bad!
Fluxbox Menu files take this form:
 
Code:
[Begin] (Fluxbox)
[submenu] (Menu1)
[exec] (item1) {item1 -a -b -c}
[exec] (item2) {item2 --option}
[end]
[submenu] (Menu2)
[exec] (item3) {item3}
[end]
[end]
You can add and delete things as you please:
 
Code:
[exec] [name] {command}
and also add submenus:
 
Code:
[submenu] (Name)
[exec] (blah) {blah}
[end]
, just don't forget to close each new menu with a "[end]"

4)Then, to put your new menu into action, right click somewhere on the desktop. Then go to "fluxbox menu" (or something similar), and select "reload configuration" or "restart"
If your menu becomes corrupt, just type from a terminal:
 
Code:
fluxbox-generate_menu
, which restores the menu to something sane
 

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