I don’t remember the name of that widget/whatever but in the context of my assocating everything with some “best thing they ever did”, I think of OpenSuse in terms of “FileManager as Root”. Similarly for KDE it was this gizmo. It was COMPACT, it was FAST, it was KISS.
I could just arrange the tree any way I liked either/and/or functionally or physically on the basis of a directory structure. I had bash and KDE scripts that I could execute with three clicks if I remember correctly: one to select like any cascadinbg KDE menu, two to double click any ‘executable’.
KDE might fall some day (I hope not) but if it does the THIS is what I will miss.
Cascading menus are something I miss a lot in kde after (well…“after”) over a decade of openbox. That’s why I use jgmenu. https://discuss.kde.org/t/share-your-desktop/490/32
From panel, desktop click. Aaand, it supports openbox pipe menus.
KDE gives me a cascading menu if I want one, and I most certainly do, but it abuses my desktop with white-space diarrhea. In desperation I created a UserAdded menu entry to get this:
Nothing wrong with emptyness on a desktop, but a menu is not desktop. It’s more like control-panel and THAT is real estate where every pixel is worth a million. Having to slide three parsecs across my monitor wears out the wheels in the laser mouse.
No, what “I” want is exactly what the subject field says, the original RealMcCoy, maybe with even more customisability like defining if items in a folder are OK for single click or need the discipline of double. Here’s what I ‘remember it as’:
Assume that the + icon is the icon for the widget, I used mostly folder names to make tree logic, etc. I had a canned folderful of mountpoints for up to 20 every partitions on each of 4-6 disks and I could mnount or unmopunt them in a couple of clicks. Some were other scripts like ‘fdisk -l’, or start/stop apache, etc.
I know it is not quite the same and probably you already know that you can get an application menu when clicking a mouse button:
→ right-click on the desktop → Configure Desktop and Wallpaper → Mouse Actions → select Application Launcher from the drop-down menu for a mouse button of your choice
Perhaps one could modify this menu to add “places” and stuff…
I posted something about the desktop click extras. There used to be a script on github that allowed custom commands ( see: https://discuss.kde.org/t/floating-miller-style-menu/3968 ). Unfortunately that page is no longer available. There once was a guy that started a custom menu thing but it’s no longer maintained https://store.kde.org/p/998904 Anywho, in my search for this type of menu, I think jgmenu has the best functionality, for one since it supports openbox pipes and those are very hard to beat imo. For example that folder thing? Myeah…you put in some pipe ( there are various types) and it does what it does. One single entry and a zillion cascades.
I absolutely agree that the lack of cascading menus ( whatever they’re for, apps, directories…) is a bummer. The option for some cascading application menu in kde is um…simplistic, to say the least. You can have that in jgmenu if you want. The thing is, tempus fugit and some gens have even never heard of floating wm’s and the likes. I’m pretty sure that these days, many have never heard of stuff like JWM, Icewm…completely oblivious of floating menus. I saw this gnome dev once who didn’t even know what xfce was. Go figure. I doubt these types of implementations will ever happen since they simply don’t come to the DE focused mind. Not anymore that is. The people from Mabox, Bunsenlabs etc do brilliant work…but they’re a dying breed I’m afraid.
I also dug deeper into fbrowse-tray and discovered it is way more configurable than I thought. Enter “fbrowse-tray” in a terminal and you get the switches and more to customize.
You can also run multiple instances with different parameters: tray icon, starting directory and more.
If you create widgits “system-tray” they can be placed in multiple positions on the desktop. Each can have multiple fbrowse-tray launchers for different places.
I do not maximize any windows. There is always a space on the left and right sides to access the desktop. Makes it easy to switch desktops or middle click for the application menu.
In Dolphin I made a service menu entry to open a new window to all my favorite places, way more than would fit in the sidebar.
My goal is to access whatever I want from anywhere no matter what is on the screen. Lazy I am. Plus I do not want to wear out the ball on my laser mouse.
Now you’ve got my attention though I don’t like 3rd party gizmos that much. I presume it’s the blue icon that starts the tree and that it could be on the panel as well?
As a sidebar, thanks to the texto generation and it’s influence on urging smartphone compatibility at every turn, classical menus are very hard to come by in OS-land and even more so in App-Land where ‘paging’ horrors seem to dominate the ‘impose this on everyone’ agenda
Another thing that matters in my peculiarly weird case (booting a different distro with either KDE or XFCE every day of the week) is that whatever I do decide to deploy has to avail and work more or less the same way on all of them.
I suggest you read some on jgmenu. Like I said, I even launched it from a custom mouse user command on kde, openbox style. But you can place ( as many) as you like, wherever you want. Furthermore, the ones I posted are kinda default. But you can have jgmenus in all sorts of layouts, kinda like rofi ( Mabox uses jgmenu for a lot of things). I think, if I’m not mistaken that is, xfce has a jgmenu plugin. Too long to explain really but you’ll find plenty.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O67CJ8WeGlg
KEEP IN MIND THOUGH! This is gtk and although I have a script I borrowed from the Bunsenlab guys, to sync the theme with the overall gtk theme, I couldn’t get it to work on kde. That’s why I use it with a fixed color scheme that matches my dark theme.
See:
I guess, as far as dynamic cascading goes on kde, there are hardly to no options. Yes, you can add submenus to the kickoff or whatever menu, but they’re all static of course. There’s the folder widget which you could point to a directory which contains a bunch of links but…I guess the best option, for now, is to create a desktop application. You can add a submenu to that if you want ( include menu something…forgotten really how to do it). There are a couple of folder widgets, but they’re too big and restricted to…well, folders. I guess for a quick and, more or less, compact static cascade style, the desktop application is your best bet.
I placed all the stock entries in a submenu with a short name. Added another submenu with a short name and inside a link to a script with a short name.
Yeah, that’s good thinking there. Really good way to achieve that type of menu. Well, like I said, I’m an openbox oldtimer and the lack of those types of menus kinda baffles me, but hey. I wonder how you can add this to the panel. Without the search, logout and all that. Just the plain menu,as in…
