Application menu files:GUI question.

[theKbStockpiler]

Do applications have human readable data that it's menus use? Not the desktop menus and icons but the actual applications themselves. Lets say we open a text editor and go to tools on the menu bar. In what readable file is the text "spell-check"in? Not the spell chech application but the text that appears in the applications menu.


Thanks in advance!

[elija]

That would depend on if the application was written to do that. So the simple answer is a "depends"

For an example have a look in the directory /usr/share/nautilus/ui (if you are using Nautilus)

[hazel]

Every graphical application is based on a widget set. Widgets are things like buttons, menus and menu items. The most popular widget sets in use are gtk (Gnome) and qt (KDE).

A widget set is just a library with functions for creating and manipulating widgets. I only know gtk, but in that library, menu items are widgets of the "container" type. What they contain is a label (and sometimes an accompanying pixmap). A label is also a widget and you can create one and pack it into a menu item, or you can use a shortcut and create the menu item with the label already in place. In either case, you give the label text as an argument.

So in a gtk-based editor you might have the statement:

spellcheck = gtk_menu_item_new_with_label ("Spell checker");

I dare say qt widgets are created in similar ways. So the answer to the question "Where is the text actually located?" is usually "In the program code".

Of course, programs with user-modifiable menus have to do it differently. Usually they have the menus defined in an xml configuration file in the user's home directory.

[theKbStockpiler]

Does anyone know of a decent overview of GUI files as it pertains to applications? I have read some guides on it but they don't go outside of the Toolkit "box" type of thinking. If I use System-Monitor I can find out what files the process is using but I think that the application is actually using mapped-files for icons and so forth. Are only images accessed during run-time? Even if you open up a RPM file it has a lot of separate folders in it. Should I do I search on each file extension?

Thanks again!