Editing the Menu on Fluxbox

**lakerdonald** · 11-23-2004

Fluxbox is growing in popularity as a lightweight alternative window manager, and as such, many new users are switching to us. Many are turned off, however, by the fact that you have to edit your menus by hand. I can't tell you the number of times I've been interuppted from my game of frozen bubble to answer fluxbox menu editing questions on irc or here. So for the sake of my gaming, I decided to write a tutorial!

Here is what you need to do:
1)Install Fluxbox (duh)
2)Either open up a shell (konsole, xterm, Eterm, etc.) and type:

Code:

vi ~/.fluxbox/menu

replacing vi with your favorite editor
OR
Open '~/.fluxbox/menu' with your favorite WYSIWYG editor
3)The file might seem a bit intimidating at first, but it's really not that bad!
Fluxbox Menu files take this form:

Code:

&#91;Begin&#93; &#40;Fluxbox&#41;
&#91;submenu&#93; &#40;Menu1&#41;
&#91;exec&#93; &#40;item1&#41; &#123;item1 -a -b -c&#125;
&#91;exec&#93; &#40;item2&#41; &#123;item2 --option&#125;
&#91;end&#93;
&#91;submenu&#93; &#40;Menu2&#41;
&#91;exec&#93; &#40;item3&#41; &#123;item3&#125;
&#91;end&#93;
&#91;end&#93;

You can add and delete things as you please:

Code:

&#91;exec&#93; &#91;name&#93; &#123;command&#125;

and also add submenus:

Code:

&#91;submenu&#93; &#40;Name&#41;
&#91;exec&#93; &#40;blah&#41; &#123;blah&#125;
&#91;end&#93;

, just don't forget to close each new menu with a "[end]"

4)Then, to put your new menu into action, right click somewhere on the desktop. Then go to "fluxbox menu" (or something similar), and select "reload configuration" or "restart"
If your menu becomes corrupt, just type from a terminal:

Code:

fluxbox-generate_menu

, which restores the menu to something sane

-lakerdonald

**Chris H** · 11-23-2004

Or you could just install this nifty bit of scripting

http://devaux.fabien.free.fr/flux/

Which adds itself to the fluxbox menu.

**lakerdonald** · 11-23-2004

you COULD do that. or you could do it MY way like a masochist muwahahaa
lol
i was seriously thinking of writing a graphical menu editor for flux, but i guess its been done :/

**genesus** · 11-23-2004

Well, they only way that I've done it so far is the lakerdonald way...which really works great man, just the logical step of doing it this way has opened up my ability to play with filestructures quite a bit. Thank you for showing me how to do this in an earlier post laker...

err, sorry about interupting the gaming!

**lakerdonald** · 11-23-2004

no problem. everybody gets one. but god help you if you interrupt my gaming again.

-lakerdonald

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