How can I add an item to the KDE Application Launcher Menu using the command line?

Question

I've added a file

/etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged/foo.menu

and the stuff in foo.menu all works in gnome. But the menu items didn't show up, even after rebooting.

I then tried adding a menu item "bogusmenu" using kmenuedit. After hitting Save in kmenuedit, bogusmenu appeared, and the menu item associated with foo.menu also showed up! So what's kmenuedit's secret updater code doing, and how can I call it from command line (specifically, an installation script)?

This is in Linux Educacional 4, which is based on Ubuntu 10.04 with KDE 4.4.5.

Some things which haven't worked:

• Using xdg-desktop-menu, touching the files in /etc/xdg/menus, running kbuildsycoca.

Answer 1

OK, for me what worked was:

Take the applications-kmenuedit.menu file generated the first time you do a save inside KMenuEdit, clean up the "bogus" entry (or whatever change needed to get KMenuEdit to actually save a file there), and then copy that into either /etc/xdg/menus or ~/.config/menus. Magic file: bah!

Answer 2

The place where it stores the menu files are usually in /usr/share/menu or /usr/share/applications.

Those are the standard places.

Answer 3

I also had a problem with my KDE menu. This occurred after I installed the Openbox desktop to test etc. For some reason I lost my menu list of applications after I returned to the Plasma desktop.

I therefore removed the Openbox desktop via muon but still had the problem. I then went to /etc/xdg/menus and found an entry for Openbox still present. I then removed obconf, the preference manager for Openbox, via the muon package manager and this fixed the problem.

I hope this helps.