Edit Xfce 4.6 right-click menu in SalineOS

I finally figured out how to customize the right-click menu in Xfce 4.6 in SalineOS. It's a simple task in Xfce 4.4 and earlier versions because those versions have a handy menu editor (so does Xfce 4.8), but the menu in Xfce 4.6 has to be edited manually. Not for the faint of heart.

Here's how it looked when I right-clicked on the desktop in SalineOS:

I wanted to get rid of all that Thunar stuff ("Open in New Window," "Create Launcher," "Create URL Link," etc.) and show only the items that appeared under the Applications sub-menu, which looked like what appeared in the main menu from the panel:

Then I wanted to customize that menu.

Here are the steps:

Created ~/.config/menus directory.
Copied /etc/xdg/menus/xfce-applications.menu to ~/.config/menus/xfce-applications.menu.

At this point, the right-click menu still looks like the default. It has all of the Thunar stuff, and the “Applications” sub-menu contains everything you see if you click on the panel's main menu icon. To get rid of the Thunar stuff, I ran:

 $ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -v --create -p /desktop-icons/style -t int -s 0

See man xfconf-query. The above command creates a new property named “/desktop-icons/style” for the xfce4-desktop “channel” and gives it type “integer” and sets the type to 0 (=OFF).

To toggle back and forth between the two properties:

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -v -p /desktop-icons/style -s 0

or

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -v -p /desktop-icons/style -s 2

The following command gives a list of properties for the xfce4-desktop “channel”:

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -l

And this command shows the same as above, but shows the settings:

$ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -lv


To edit the menu, I edited ~/.config/menus/xfce-applications.menu. As an example, here are the steps for adding a menu entry for Google Chrome:

First, I looked in /usr/share/applications for the name of the .desktop file, then added the following line to both the “Include” and “Layout” sections:

<filename>google-chrome.desktop</filename>

To edit the actual application name that showed up in the menu:

# gedit /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

There, I edited the following line:

Name=google-chrome-stable

Changes to those .desktop entries apparently don't take effect without starting a new session.

For Dolphin, I had to first copy the .desktop file from /usr/share/applications/kde4:

# cp /usr/share/applications/kde4/dolphin.desktop /usr/share/applications/dolphin.desktop

Then, followed the same steps as above.


Here's how it looks now when I right-click on the desktop in SalineOS: