LINUX-DESKTOP-MENU-EDITORS

Which application can you use when you need to modify the menu with applications on your desktop? Let's take a look.

Linux desktops (like Gnome or KDE) usually follow the freedesktop.org menu specification for their hierarchical menus with desktop applications [1]. Thanks to this, you can edit the application menu manually via files stored in directories defined by the freedesktop specification [1] like $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/menus/${XDG_MENU_PREFIX} (which will be something like /etc/xdg/menus/, /home/$USER/.config/menus/, etc. on your system). However, if you are lazy like me and prefer a more easy and comfortable approach, you will choose a GUI application. The most famous one is probably Alacarte, but I personally prefer the one called MenuLibre. If you need to modify the application menu of your desktop, now you know what to install.

MenuLibre

An advanced menu editor that provides modern features through a clean and user-friendly interface.

https://smdavis.us/projects/menulibre/

Alacarte

A menu editor for GNOME.

https://github.com/GNOME/alacarte

Meow

An application menu editor for GNOME written in Scala (Java).

https://pnmougel.github.io/meow/

And that's it. The entire purpose of this post is to have one with the name "MenuLibre" in it, because I always forget that name when configuring someone else's desktop and end up having to search for it on Google every time.

[1] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-1.0.html