Example | Desktop Menu Specification

Desktop Menu Specification

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The company ShinyThings Inc. has developed an application named WebMirror 1.0 and would like to add its own submenu to the system menus consisting of a WebMirror menu item and a WebMirror Admin Tool menu item. The company will use "shinythings" as its vendor id. For the purpose of this example all menu items will be available in two languages, English and Dutch. The language code for Dutch is nl.

First the company needs to create two .desktop files that describe the two menu items:

          datadir/applications/shinythings-webmirror.desktop:

          [Desktop Entry]
          Encoding=UTF-8
          Type=Application

          Exec=webmirror
          Icon=webmirror

          Name=WebMirror
          Name[nl]=WebSpiegel

and

          datadir/applications/shinythings-webmirror-admin.desktop:

          [Desktop Entry]
          Encoding=UTF-8
          Type=Application

          Exec=webmirror-admintool
          Icon=webmirror-admintool

          Name=WebMirror Admin Tool
          Name[nl]=WebSpiegel Administratie Tool

A .directory file needs to be installed to provide a title and icon for the sub-menu itself:

          datadir/desktop-directories/shinythings-webmirror.directory:

          [Desktop Entry]
          Encoding=UTF-8

          Icon=webmirror

          Name=WebMirror
          Name[nl]=WebSpiegel

And finally, a .menu file needs to be provided that links it all together:

          sysconfdir/menus/application-merged/shinythings-webmirror.menu:

          <!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 1.0//EN"
          "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu-spec/menu-1.0.dtd">
          <Menu>
            <Name>Applications</Name>
            <Menu>
              <Name>WebMirror</Name>
              <Directory>shinythings-webmirror.directory</Directory>
              <Include>
                <Filename>shinythings-webmirror.desktop</Filename>
                <Filename>shinythings-webmirror-admin.desktop</Filename>
              </Include>
            </Menu>

Desktop Menu Specification

C.3 Example #