Editing applications in the classic and whisker menu in Xfce
Reuben James (ruenoak)
v1.0, 02 April 2024
---
This document describes the whisker and classic menu in the Xfce desktop and how to edit the default application set. This tutorial is based on Xfce-4.18 on Debian 12 (Bookworm)
---
1. Introduction
Xfce has two menu options available, the classic menu and the whisker menu. Which one is set as default will Depending on you distribution. Debian sets the classic menu as default where as Xubuntu set the whisker menu as it's default menu. Some distributions do not ship with the whisker menu installed, but you can usually locate it in the distributions package repositories and install it.
Menulibre is a menu editor that supports a variety of free and opensource desktops such as, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, MATE, Pantheon, Unity, and Xfce. Menulibre may not be installed by default but it can easily be installed from the the distributions package repositories.
2. Installation
If menulibre is not installed, open a terminal and type 'sudo apt install menulibre'.
Alternatively open your package manager (Software Centre), search and select menulibre from the menu and install.
3. Usage
After installation you can access menulibre from the applications menu, under 'Accessories'. Alternatively you can access menulibre by right clicking the menu icon and in the whisker menu, selecting 'Edit Applications' and in the classic menu select 'Applications Menu'.
Note: If the Applications Menu is greyed out, you may need to log out and back in again.
Once in menulibre you can edit the order, hide and add applications in the menu. Your options are Add, Save, Undo, Redo, Revert, Test Launcher and Delete
Note on Deleting applications: You can't delete application entries in menulibre as a standard user. To delete an application from the menu, uninstalling the application should remove it.
Once you have finished editing your menu, save it and your changes will be available immediately.
Menulibre creates configuration files in two places.
- A folder called 'menus' located in /home/USER/.config/menus
- A folder called 'applications' located in /home/USER/.local/share/applications
The 'menus' folder will contain an xml file called 'xfce-applications.menu' and the 'applications' folder will contain desktop files for any application you have added to the menu.
[Important!] If you break your menu, you can delete the files created in these folders to restore your default menu.
4. Reference
---