How to add your application to the menus | Desktop Menu Specification

How to add your application to the menus

Desktop Menu Specification

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C How to add your application to the menus #

The short answer for third party applications is:

Install desktop entries to datadir/applications/ for each menu item. Please namespace the filename, as in "vendor-foo.desktop", or use a subdirectory of datadir/applications/ so you have "vendor/foo.desktop." Please be sure all desktop entries are valid (see the desktop-file-utils (http://www.freedesktop.org/software/desktop-file-utils/) package for a validation utility).
Install an XML menu file to sysconfdir/desktop/menus/applications-merged/ to add any submenus, if your desktop entries aren't already included in some common categories.
Install any directory entries needed for your submenus to datadir/desktop-directories/, taking care to namespace and validate the directory entries.

Also, at least for a good long while, installing a directory hierarchy to the old GNOME/KDE specific locations such as /usr/share/applnk and /usr/share/gnome/apps should work. There are two ways to support both the old and new menu systems at the same time:

If you add a Categories line to the desktop entries in the legacy hierarchy, implementations of this specification will ignore their location in the legacy hierarchy, and arrange them according to Categories instead. This allows you to install a single desktop file that works in all cases, though on the down side it's in a legacy location.
If you add the line OnlyShowIn=Old; to a desktop entry, then old legacy implementations that ignore OnlyShowIn will still show the desktop entry, but implementations of this specification will not. Thus you can add an "OnlyShowIn=Old;" entry to the legacy hierarchy, and a new-style desktop entry to datadir/applications/, and still get only one entry in the menus.