Editing User Menus and Menu Merging
You can use the following GNOME Desktop applications to edit menus
for users:
A simple menu editor is available for users to edit their menus. For
more information, see Working With Menus in the
GNOME User Guide. Alternatively, you
can manually create and edit a user menu file.
To manually create a custom menu for a user, the
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/menus/applications.menu
must exist. In the case that $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set,
the default ~/.config directory is used. Since this is the
first location that is searched for the
applications.menu file, it takes precedence over all
other menu files.
User menus can contain all the elements described in the section called “Menu Definition Files”. For a complete list of the elements
allowed, see the XDG menu
specification.
Since user menu files take precedence over the system menu file, it
will completely replace the system menu unless it explicitly
merges the system menu. Information on menu merging
is available in the following subsections.
Often, a user only wants to add or delete menu items in addition
to the standard system menu. To support single changes like these, it is
recommended that you use the <MergeFile>
element with the attribute type="parent" within the
user's applications.menu file.
The <MergeFile> element allows a menu to
be merged with the contents of the user's menu file. When you specify
the attribute type="parent", then the contents of the
<MergeFile> element are ignored and the next
applications.menu file in the
$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/menus directory is used for
merging.
 | Older Specifications |
|---|
Older specifications did not include the type
attribute and simply required the location of the menu file to be
merged as the content of the <MergeFile>
element. As a result, you may still see a location specified in the
contents of <MergeFile>, even when
type="parent". |
The merging is performed as follows:
The children of the root <Menu>
element in the merged menu file[3] are substituted for the
<MergeFile> element in the base menu
file.
All child <Menu> elements with the
same name are consolidated into a single
<Menu> element. This is by done appending
all child elements of each <Menu> element
with the same name into the last occurrence of
the menu element.
Example 2.3, “Merging the System Menu” shows an example of a
user menu file explicitly merging the system menu file.
Example 2.3. Merging the System Menu
<!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 1.0//EN"
"https://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu-spec/menu-1.0.dtd">
<Menu>
<Name>Applications</Name>
<MergeFile type="parent">/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu</MergeFile>
<Menu>
<Name>Accessibility</Name>
<Exclude>
<Filename>dasher.desktop</Filename>
</Exclude>
</Menu>
</Menu>
Arbitrary menu files can be merged in much the same way as system
menus. The difference is that the type attribute must
be set to path or must be excluded from the
<MergeFile> element in order to do this type of
merge.
The merge is performed in the same way except that the location of
the merged menu file is specified in the contents
of the <MergeFile> element.
