wmgenmenu: A Window Maker menu generator
The inspiration comes from Geir T. Kristiansen's 'genmenu' shell script
(http://gtk.no/genmenu) which I have been hapilly using for
the last 9 years or so.
That script generates the Window Maker menu by asking a few questions
and checks whether the applications in a predefined list exist in
the user's $PATH, so that the menu contains only the applications
which are guaranteed to exist and which the user cares about.
However I always thought it was a bit slow to finish, even
when having a file containing the answers to the questions to
be piped in.
And as Kristiansen states in his webpage, his script does not
support internationalization:
"If you want internationalization I really suggest you rewrite
genmenu from scratch anyway in a more sensible language and remove
other limitations while you are at it."
so I decided to rewrite in C and make it support internationalization
(only English and German so far). While I am not sure yet if I removed
"other limitations while you are at it" I definitely made it finish faster.
This C program does not make you questions though.
But in the same spirit as the author of 'genmenu', who says:
"Genmenu is a hack, deal with it, it just happens to serve my needs."
I present you 'wmgenmenu', which you can use like this:
wmgenmenu > /home/mafra/GNUstep/Defaults/WMRootMenu
and the menu is automatically generated from the list of
predefined apps which are contained in the C sources (wmgenmenu.h).
And when you generate the WMRootMenu as above, wmaker will automatically
load the new menu for you (due to the 'inotify' mechanism in wmaker-crm).
As for 'wmgenmenu' being faster than 'genmenu':
[mafra@Pilar:~]$ time ./genmenu.sh < answers.txt &> /dev/null
real 0m3.626s
user 0m0.968s
sys 0m1.830s
[mafra@Pilar:~]$ time wmgenmenu &> /dev/null
real 0m0.020s
user 0m0.006s
sys 0m0.013s