Another request: currently, the menu item Preferences is accessible by
Applications - Preferences. In my opinion it would probably be more logical if that would be changed to
Settings - Preferences.
Reason: the Preferences
are (user) settings.
: We are unable to do that at this point in time due to the technical complexity of the task and the time and manpower it would require.
Now for the details ...
You are not the first to make the request or something similar. I will also totally admit the moksha/enlightenment menu needs a complete makeover which sadly would mean complete rethinking and altering larger sections of code. But it should certainly be modernized and better organized, esp all the totally confusing to newcomers Settings panel. Even
Raster agrees as we have had several discussions on this matter before.
Now to move
Applications - Preferences to
Settings - Preferences sounds like a relatively minor and easy change and if it were say a website it would be. So to understand why it is not easy with the Moksha code base, let me first explain what the Application menu displays. You probably are familiar with at least some of this explanation.
It displays Applications installed that contain a desktop file, the desktop files are usually installed in /
usr/share/applications. But the systems looks in several spots for them, but I am going to ignore that as needless detail. The desktop files themselves should follow the
XDG desktop entry specifications, now it is up to whoever wrote the code or makes the package in the repos to ensure that this is indeed the case. It should be note here that both Moksha as well as Enlightenment totally ignore the OnlyShowIn and NotShowIn fields in the desktop files. Meaning we still show them. It should be noted that this is a standard and a convention, you run across window managers that do not follow this. Such window managers usually predate the XDG specifications.
Enlightenment and hence Moksha however is (mostly) XDG compliant. A noticeable exception in Moksha is the configuration files in ~/.e. Really they should be in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and if that is not set default to ~./config. Enlightenment now supports this but only if you compile it with certain compilation flags, if I am understanding what I saw in the code a few days correctly. I do not compile enlightenment or package it that way, however. Maybe in the future Moksha will also move to offering support for the XDG_CONFIG_HOME standard. But if we do I would imagine alot of confusion out of some of our users.
Back on topic, a desktop file contains a line Categories which determines where in a menu the Apps name and Icon will be displayed. Stuff that ends up in
Applications - Preferences ends up there partially because of whatever is in this line. I say partially because another XDG standard comes into play here: the XDG
Desktop Menu Specification. Now what all this means is there is a configuration file in /etc/xdg/menus/ (at least on Bodhi/Ubuntu/...) which determines how the Window Manager organizes the Applications in the Menu. By default bodhi sets the menu to read /etc/xdg/menus/moksha-applications.menu, which is provided by the
moksha-menu package. You can install and use other menu packages. enlightenment on the other hand reads /etc/xdg/menus/e-applications.menu, and this file is part of
enlightenments source code. You can find other menu packages in the repo or create your own or edit one of these. It is a config file after all. Bodhi used to by default use the LXDE menu package, lxde-applications.menu provided by the lxmenu-data package in the repos. To me it made sense to replace that with our own package, so I created one for it. Naturally different
*-applications.menu files result in a different menu structure, install a few and take a look. You can changes the menu used in moksha/enlightenment in the settings panel under the Menus tab.
Now code wise for moksha, an
EFL process efreetd is what processes the Desktop files and
the efreet library is what Moksha uses for processing this information. The code for the Main menu which you see when you click the Start button is contained in
e_int_menus.c which naturally uses the stuff in
e_menu.c. Now what ends up in
Preferences found in the settings panel, that is found in
e_configure.c populated by the function
e_configure_efreet_desktop_update. The settings Panel itself is generated by the
conf module. And it should be noted various module can and often do add entries to either Moksha Main Menu and/or to the settings panel.
All modules named
conf_* add stuff, as does the shot module and the classic menu module and more.
I am showing you all this because this is the code we are working with. Now to move the Settings Panel tab,
Preferences out of the Settings Panel to be Displayed Directly under
Settings - Preferences would require a complete rewrite of maybe every file I have mentioned so far. The function
e_configure_efreet_desktop_update provides no way to move this entry on the Settings panel to the menu, it merely provides a way to move its location on the Settings panel. Nor do I see any easy way of doing it, short of rewriting the entire file e_configure.c or at the very least big chunks of it. As well as in all likelihood changes to some or all of the other files mentioned. This is not an undertaking I am willing to take at this late point in our release and if i ever do undertake it, it would be experimental and end up in our testing repo until we worked out all or most of the Bugs. I would be unlikely to get it perfect the first time around or even the 10th, lol.
