A Panel Launcher Menu for MATE

A recent upgrade to my Linux Mint PC forced me to switch the desktop environment from Cinnamon (which I've been using for years) to MATE. For the most part, that was painless, but a few things from my old desktop did not translate well.

I had the icons on my Cinnamon desktop organized in a way that made sense to me (but would baffle anyone else); MATE decided they needed to be alphabetized and snapped to a grid. That will be easy (but tedious) to fix. The trickier part was recreating the mix of indicators and applets I wanted in the panel at the bottom of the screen.

One feature I've gotten used to is having an applet that pops open a customize menu of launchers. There's a really excellent Gnome shell extension named MyLauncher that is easy to add in Cinnamon but apparently not available for MATE. Clicking the MyLauncher panel icon opens a pop-up menu that is fully customizable. Menu entries are text, not icons, and you select what the text says and what it does. As one example, I have an entry reading "Search files" that launches Searchmonkey (which I heartily recommend).

I'm a bit finicky (anal?) about how such a menu should work.

1. I want it to list just selected applications, not every application on the system.
2. I want text prompts, not icons. (If I'm thinking "search for a file", my brain is not translating that to "look for a picture of a monkey".)
3. I want to choose the prompts myself. (Before the morning coffee sinks in, I may not remember that "searchmonkey" is the command I'm looking for.)
4. I want a single list; I don't want to have to wade through categories (as one does in the main Mint menu).
5. Adding/editing the menu needs to be reasonably easy.

MyLauncher met all those criteria. After the switch to MATE (and after discovering I could not use MyLauncher any more), I went looking for something equivalent but struggled to find an adequate substitute. It is easy to add an instance of "Main Menu", "Menu Bar" or "mintMenu" to the panel, but all of those default to listing every application (violating item 1 above) and use the same categories as the main menu (violating item 4). I think I could edit my way past that, but deleting a zillion applications added by default is more work than manually adding the handful I want. Also, when a new application is installed, it is added to the main menu automatically, and I'm not sure if it would wind up added to my custom menu as well (forcing me to edit out each newly installed application).

Anyway, after a bit of searching I found a solution with which I'm comfortable. It combines two programs. Rofi is something of a Swiss army knife, with many functions, one of which is providing menus (with search-as-you-type functionality). Rofi is available from the Canonical repositories, so I was able to install it using Synaptic. The program that actually produces the menus is Menugen, which is actually a set of BASH scripts. There's not much to installation: you just download it, unzip it and store it someplace.

With Rofi and Menugen installed, I just had to load my old MyLauncher menu into a text editor, massage it into the format Menugen wants, and park it someplace. I made the new menu an executable script that calls menugen to interpret it. I then added to the panel a custom launcher invoking my menu script, and that was that.

In case it helps anyone, here's an abbreviated version of my script:

#!/home/paul/Software/menugen-master/menugen
#begin main
name="Quick Launch"
numbered=false
add_exec "Freeguide"  'freeguide'
add_exec "Text editor"  "xed"
add_nop "-----------------"
add_exec "Synaptic"  "gksudo synaptic"
add_nop "-----------------"
add_exec "Terminal"  "terminator"
#end main

The add_nop commands add "no-op" lines (separators), while the add_exec commands add menu entries. There is also an add_item command for adding menu entries and an add_link command for linking to a submenu. The primary difference between add_item and add_exec (at least as far as I'm concerned) is that add_item returns you to the menu after you make a choice and add_exec closes the menu after you make a choice (which is the behavior I want).