menus, Name/GenericName

Rex Dieter rdieter at math.unl.edu
Mon Mar 28 12:47:40 UTC 2005


Dariusz J. Garbowski wrote:

> "Movie Player", "PDF Viewer", "Email", "Browser", whatever... These 
> names, although perhaps more helpful for those who are unfamiliar or 
> less familiar with Linux software, are quite meaningless for those who 
> know what app exactly they want to run. What will start when I choose 
> "Some player" or "Some viewer" thing? Worse, it changes from release to 
> release and from distro to distro... This is one of the reasons why I 
> find myself avoiding menus completely and still running everything from 
> commandline -- at least I know what I run ;-)

Amen brother.  I've harped on that several times.

IMO, the correct/proper solution is already available.  The (free) 
.desktop standard already allows for each app to have
Name=
GenericName=

So, if Evolution's case,
Name=Evolution
GenericName=Email

and it is up the the menuing system to display these.  KDE allows for 
display options:
Name only
Name (Generic Name)
GenericName (Name)

I'm guessing the reason this hadn't yet been adopted by Fedora Core is 
because Gnome didn't support the use of GenericName (hopefully that's 
not the case anymore).

-- Rex




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