MX Linux Forum

PPC wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 6:30 am<snip>
...and has all the the functionality I wanted it to have (for window previews I use skippy-XD; for app and file searcher, the excellent and fast Drill; and have a menu generator that does not even need to be installed!).
<snip>
... It's not even particulary hard to make MXFB have a fully working menu - it costs only a line in the menu (in my case "All Categories") and I can use all the apps I want from there, without using XFCE's launcher. I even wrote a small script to put (or remove) my prefered apps on the start of menu!
...

PPC wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 6:30 am During my increasingly less free time, I tried, in antiX and Mx other WM: Enlightenment (E. for short).
There are many things that particular WM does right: small memory footprint (some 50Mb less than Fluxbox!), manages desktop icons and wallpapers by itself, has composition, lots of eye candy (like window previews) and it's very simple to add icons to the toolbar or the preferred applications menu. It's gorgeous, if you happen to like eye candy and animations- looks like a full blown DE (like XFCE, but with even more eye candy). It has a amazing and blazing fast app and file searcher!
I do recommend E. if you want a even lower resources usage, and like eye candy...

But... I went back to MXFB- I feel like it's a bit like my baby- I tweaked until It looks like I wanted it to look (I posted a screen shot, a while ago, I don't even need to run the Dock- it's great, but I want to conserve my RAM - my OS looks a Kind of MX XFCE with a bottom toolbar) and has all the the functionality I wanted it to have (for window previews I use skippy-XD; for app and file searcher, the excellent and fast Drill; and have a menu generator that does not even need to be installed!).
MXFB it's rock solid- the icons don't go missing out of the blue, like they sometimes do in E. Nor do "gadgets" jump around randomly when you are moving them.
Fluxbox does look way more spartan, with very little eye candy- and even uses a bit more RAM- but, when I put an icon on screen, it stays there, allowing me to launch my apps as fast as possible.
What are OS's and WM and DE's suppose to do? Allow users to run the apps they need, no matter if it's for work or play!
It's not even particulary hard to make MXFB have a fully working menu - it costs only a line in the menu (in my case "All Categories") and I can use all the apps I want from there, without using XFCE's launcher. I even wrote a small script to put (or remove) my prefered apps on the start of menu!
So, despite having some minor disagreements with Jerry's default design choices, I do believe MXFB, is, in fact one of the (lower resources) system available out there, while providing a ample array of tools and almost infinite application choices.
Well done Jerry, and the rest of the Dev team!

P.

Jerry3904 wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 10:32 am Well, the menu does have "All apps" which brings up the full Whisker menu so for me they're not missing at all. Just sort of compacted.

ceeslans wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 5:57 pm fwiw same can also be achieved with 'fbmenugen' --> an 18kb perl-script.
below scrot shows it is running in default mx rootmenu (~/.fluxbox/menu-mx).
it uses one entry in menu-mx (replacing the 'All Apps' line) to include a categorized application menu, generated by the script. if preferred, the user can regenerate it with icons - or plain text.

Can't locate Linux/DesktopFiles.pm in @INC (you may need to install the Linux::DesktopFiles module) (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.24.1 /usr/local/share/perl/5.24.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.24 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.24 /usr/share/perl/5.24 /usr/local/lib/site_perl /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl-base)

Jerry3904 wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 9:08 pm (FWIW: I had a non-traditional concept for the menu, I didn't just forget stuff.)

Since I already have an "All Apps" entry, it's easy to paste in the code there so no change in the menu translations would be required:

Going to have to think about this--I don't see the use for myself TBH.

PPC wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2020 4:25 am I never used this script because when I run fbmenugen I get this error:

Code: Select all

Can't locate Linux/DesktopFiles.pm in @INC (you may need to install the Linux::DesktopFiles module) (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.24.1 /usr/local/share/perl/5.24.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.24 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.24 /usr/share/perl/5.24 /usr/local/lib/site_perl /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl-base)

P.

ceeslans wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:27 am

PPC wrote: Mon Jul 27, 2020 6:30 am<snip>
...and has all the the functionality I wanted it to have (for window previews I use skippy-XD; for app and file searcher, the excellent and fast Drill; and have a menu generator that does not even need to be installed!).
<snip>
... It's not even particulary hard to make MXFB have a fully working menu - it costs only a line in the menu (in my case "All Categories") and I can use all the apps I want from there, without using XFCE's launcher. I even wrote a small script to put (or remove) my prefered apps on the start of menu!
...

@ppc: could you please explain a bit more about the menu generator - and script to add/remove preferred apps on the startmenu.
would love to see how you are doing that, thanks!

Jerry3904 wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2020 6:28 am

PPC wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2020 4:25 am I never used this script because when I run fbmenugen I get this error:

Code: Select all

Can't locate Linux/DesktopFiles.pm in @INC (you may need to install the Linux::DesktopFiles module) (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.24.1 /usr/local/share/perl/5.24.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.24 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.24 /usr/share/perl/5.24 /usr/local/lib/site_perl /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl-base)

P.

I had the same experience.

Jerry3904 wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2020 10:31 am Been thinking about this some more, and have concluded that it would be more consistent for the next MXFB version to have the root menu's "All apps" open even more menus (which I was trying to avoid) than it would be to launch AppFinder, which is best suited for the dock.

Doesn't mean I like or will use it myself...

Jerry3904 wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:55 pm I snooped around, and am now testing rofi. Very helpful entry (as always) in the Arch Wiki.

jeffreyC wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2020 7:10 pm gmrun has tab completion and history, so if you have run it before all you need to do is arrow up to find it.

Jerry3904 wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2020 6:04 am Got rofi running well (F2), very fast and good looking (many themes). Doubling it with Alt-F2: xfce4-appfinder -c which doesn't need the exact name (e.g., "writer" works with it, doesn't with rofi).

rofi -modi drun -show drun

rofi -combi-modi window,drun -show combi -color-window "#000000, #000000, #000000" -color-normal "#000000, #b3e774, #000000, #b3e774, #000000" -color-active "#000000, #b3e774, #000000, #b3e774, #000000" -color-urgent "#000000, #b3e774, #000000, #b3e774, #000000"

Jerry3904 wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2020 8:16 am Thanks, I know about the drun stuff and watched a couple of videos myself. I'm not interested in a third menu so didn't hi that way. But I think rofi over fbrun is a no-brainer.

Jerry3904 wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2020 10:15 am I'm still not getting icons. Do you have dmenu installed?

mod4 space :Exec rofi -modi drun -show drun -show-icons

PPC wrote: Fri Jul 31, 2020 6:06 am <snip>
... Is there any interest in also adding one of my previous suggestions- a "Recent files" menu entry?
Since Fb does not have dynamic menus, this can only, to my knowledge, be done using a script. I have one written, but I got some feedback in the antiX forum and it does not work well in non Latin characters ( cyrilic in particular)...

For anyone wanting to test that script, it's below (just paste the code into a text file called something like "recent_files.sh", save it, make it executable and run it. You can, of course add it to the menu, create a shortcut idesk icon, or a dock icon, so it can be easily accessible...

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
### Recent files window- by PPC, 13/1/2020, for use with antiX and MX-fluxbox
#GPL licence- do what you want with this, but please keep lines about the author, date and licence
# works on any system with yad and xdg-open installed, optionally: exo-open (see exceptions to the general rule, when launching files, near the end.
# https://pastebin.com/fSDPR9E1
#Parse the file that stores the recent used files, send output to recent0.txt
awk -F"file://|\" " '/file:\/\// {print $2}' ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel > ~/.recent0.txt
#reverse contents order, so last file comes first, and so on...
tac ~/.recent0.txt > ~/.recent.txt
#function to decode file name (from %20 instead of spaces, etc, from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/159253/decoding-url-encoding-percent-encoding
urldecode() {
    local url_encoded="${1//+/ }"
    printf '%b' "${url_encoded//%/\\x}"
}
# Use a undecorated Yad window to select file to be executed
EXEC=$(yad --title="Recent files" --undecorated --width=450 --height=400 --center --separator=" " --list  --column=" Recent Files:"  < ~/.recent.txt)
#do decoding on the file name, just in case it has spaces or special characters that come up as %xx
decoded=$(urldecode $EXEC)
# general rule: open selected file with the aplication used for its file type
openwith=xdg-open 
###Exceptions to the general rule: LibreOffice Writer ".odt" files - check extension and  force it to open with lowriter; also more exceptions: like open ".sh" files for edition and run ".desktop" files instead of editing them
check=$(echo -n $EXEC | tail -c 3)
	if [ "$check" == "odt" ]; then openwith=lowriter ; fi  #this solves bug opening odt files with spaces
	if [ "$check" == ".sh" ]; then openwith=exo-open ; fi
	if [ "$check" == "top" ]; then openwith=exo-open ; fi
#add quotes to the file name, just in case it has spaces
EXEC2="'"$decoded"'"
#launch the selected file
run=$(echo $openwith $EXEC2)
eval $run