xdg-xmenu

Note: A python version is being (or has been) worked on, which is a little bit faster. The shell version probably won't get feature updates anymore.

xdg-xmenu is a small shell script to generate xdg desktop menu file for xmenu, a simple x11 menu utility.

This script is only a toy project and I have not tested it outside of my own machine, so bugs are expected and feel free to report them here.

Requirement

Update: Since Imlib2 1.8.0, svg images can be rendered directly, so the following caching can be skipped. Recent xdg-xmenu provides a -S option to use the svg icons directly, see usage below.

The script will look for icons loosely according to freedesktop specification. If the icons found are svg images, which is very possible, you will need any one of the following tools (sorted by priority) to convert svg images to pngs:

• rsvg-convert: provided by librsvg package, it is the fastest one among the three.
• convert: provided by imagemagick package.
• inkscape: this is about as fast (or slow) as convert

The generated png images will be cached to ~/.cache/xdg-xmenu/icons folder. As a result, the first time running this script might cost some time.

Usage

xdg-xmenu [-a] [-b fallback_icon] [-E] [-f] [-G] [-i icon_theme] [-n] [-s icon_size] [-S] [-t terminal]

Options
  -a  Show icons with `OnlyShowIn' key in .desktop file. These desktop entries are
      usually programs specifically for desktop environments. Default is not show‐
      ing those desktop entries.

  -b fallback_icon
      Fallback icon in case one can not be found. Both an icon name and a file
      path is acceptable. Default is application-x-executable.

  -E  Show empty categories even if there are no apps. Default is to hide
      those categories.

  -G  Do not show app's generic name.

  -f  Force to cache svg icons to png, even if cached images already exist. Useful
      when switching to a new icon theme.

  -i icon_theme
      Icon theme. Default is parsed from gtk3 configuration file.

  -n  Dry run mode. The conversion of svg images will be skipped. In others words,
      there is no file operations. The menu will still be printed with all the
      icon paths.

  -s icon_size
      Icon size. Default is 24.

  -S  Do not cache svg icons, use svg files directly. Supported since Imlib2 1.8.0.

  -t terminal
      Terminal emulator to use. Default is xterm.

To use it, you can redirect the output to a file and then feed it to xmenu by

$ xdg-xmenu > menu; xmenu < menu | sh &

Piping directly to xmenu is not recommended due to the slow speed.

xmenu-apps is an example script.

Configuration

The command line options can also be replaced with environment variables:

• XDG_MENU_FALLBACK_ICON: set fallback icon
• XDG_MENU_ICON_SIZE: set icon size
• XDG_MENU_ICON_THEME: set icon theme
• XDG_MENU_SHOW_ALL: show 'OnlyShowIn' apps
• XDG_MENU_TERMINAL: set terminal emulator

Screenshot