[Techtalk] Descriptions in KDE menus

[David Sumbler]

Lucia Sanchez <lu at gusilu.net> writes:

> Andrea Landaker wrote:
>>>Is there a way of getting the menu to display the description?  Also,
>>>how do you change the size of the icons in the menu - I have spent
>>>ages trying to find answers to these two questions, but with no
>>>success.
>> You should be able to find this setting in the KDE Control Center
>> (kcontrol), under Desktop -> Panels -> Menus.  You can pick if it
>> just shows the name, Name (Description), or Description (Name).  You
>> can have it show the icon or not, though I don't see any way from
>> here to change the icon size.
>
> And if you like menus a little bit more customized that what you can
> achieve through the KDE Control Center, try editing it with kmenuedit.

Yes, it was kmenuedit that I was using to start with, as mentioned in
my original post.  That's where I would have expected control of the
menu's appearance to be.

An OT comment: one of the things I like about Linux is the fact that
most things can be configured by editing a text file.  But I get the
impression that some desktop programs are getting more and more like
Windows, and that you have to use a graphic front-end to configure
them, or at any rate you're not encouraged to edit things directly -
it can be very difficult to find the necessary information.

The Gnome menu, for instance, seems to be extremely cryptic (not that
I've used Gnome much, partly for that reason), and "autocomplete"
lists in Firefox are not stored in "human readable form".  Why on
earth not?  Why can't they keep things transparent?  With the speed of
modern computers there seems to be no reason not to use ASCII files
for anything which isn't extremely time-critical: filling in a form on
a web-page certainly isn't that.

David

-- 

david at aeolia.co.uk