Prevent KDE and Gnome from showing eachothers icons in the menu

gnomeiconskdemenu

Often, I have both KDE4 and Gnome installed on my machines. What really bothers me when I do this, is that the Gnome menu will show all kinds of things that I will hardly ever use in Gnome, like Konqueror, KMail and Konversation. (Just to name a few, the list is obviously much longer.)

I hate this.

I would love a way (an easy way) to make sure Gnome only shows Gnome related icons and KDE only shows KDE related icons. Of course, you can manually hide all the KDE icons from the Gnome menu, but that sucks **, so I'd rather not go that way.

Does any have a solution for this? A script maybe?

Best Answer

The menu entries are created from .desktop-files. There you can specify if the icon shall be only shown in Gnome, only in KDE or in both with e.g. a OnlyShowIn=KDE line.

To hide all KDE-apps, you might do as root

cd /usr/share/applications/kde4/
for i in *.desktop; do echo “OnlyShowIn=KDE” >> $i; done

To hide Gnome-Apps in KDE, echo “OnlyShowIn=GNOME” into the Gnome .desktop-files.

However, when an update to a package arrives, this could override this, so you might to have to repeat it, e.g. with a cron job. Make a backup of /usr/share/applications/kde4/ before doing this to be safe if something goes wrong.

For a list of all information which can be included in a .desktop-file, see http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s05.html

Controlling KDE activities via dbus

KDE can be controlled from the command line with qdbus. The general syntax is qdbus COMPONENT PATH METHOD ARGUMENT1... where COMPONENT is typically something like org.freedesktop.Foo or org.kde.Bar, PATH denotes a class exposed by the component, METHOD is the name of a particular action in that class, and there may be further arguments depending on the method.

Here are commands for KDE ≥4.7 to list activities, to get the current activity, and to set the current activity.

qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager org.kde.ActivityManager.ListActivities
qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager org.kde.ActivityManager.CurrentActivity
qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager org.kde.ActivityManager.SetCurrentActivity "activity identifier "

Finding out what dbus can do

KDE's dbus documentation is very poor. Each class is minimally documented, e.g. Activity, DesktopCorona). But you'll probably have to experiment and perhaps read the source (there are links in the API documentation pages) to find out what is available.

If you type qdbus with up to two arguments, it will list the possibilities for the next argument. The following shell snippet lists all available Qt-dbus methods:

for x in $(qdbus | sed '/^:/d'); do
  for y in $(qdbus $x); do
    qdbus $x $y | sed "s~^~$x $y ~"
  done
done 2>/dev/null >qdbus.list

Another way to explore the dbus tree is qdbusviewer in the Qt development tools. There is also a Python qt-dbus interface as part of PyQt.

Getting the shell to react

To make a shell react to external events, the best you can reasonably do is make it check something before displaying a prompt. Bash runs $PROMPT_COMMAND before displaying a prompt, and zsh executes the precmd function. So you can look up the current KDE activity and do something if it's changed from the last time you looked.

Configuring mouse for right+left button simulating middle click (for copy/paste)

It is configured in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

You'll see a section that looks like

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "ImPS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
EndSection

Here is a random vaguely relevant link from SU.

https://superuser.com/questions/258649/multi-button-mouse-on-x11-how-can-i-configure-several-buttons-to-act-as-the-midd

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Expand KDE activities concept to the shell

Controlling KDE activities via dbus

Finding out what dbus can do

Getting the shell to react

Configuring mouse for right+left button simulating middle click (for copy/paste)

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