Over the past week and a half, I have made releases for all of my projects. Most of them were pretty minor, and just amounted to updating the translations (and fixing an issue where the Qt-supplied translations were not being properly loaded). Packagers will now need to depend on lrelease, because I no longer include the precompiled binary .qm files.

The projects with actual feature releases were CuteMaze, Hexalate, Tanglet, and Tetzle. For the most part, the features added will not be obvious unless you have a 4K monitor, because the biggest thing I added was support for high-DPI displays. I did also finish moving my projects to be Qt 5 only, and to use C++11.

As usual, report any issues you have. Enjoy!

I am happy to announce that I have finally at long last made a new feature release of Whisker Menu, version 1.6.0! There aren’t a whole lot of new features, but that is because the menu is pretty much complete at this point. Some of the features have been sitting in git for quite a long time now (oops), like the ability to navigate categories using the arrow keys. Another new feature is the option to show tooltips on the application launchers. I also tweaked the search results to put results from favorites and recent before the rest.

I have also released version 2.0.0, which is a like-for-like port to GTK+ 3. There are no new features, just the requisite code changes to support a newer version of GTK+. I have been using the GTK+ 3 port for a while now, and for me it works just fine. It may be a while before users have it, though, because the dependencies are very new. I’m also not going to maintain backported libraries, so I will still be building GTK+ 2 packages for now.

If you have any issues, please report them. I cannot fix bugs that I do not know about. Anyway, enjoy the updated menu!

Yesterday I released a new Whisker Menu, version 1.5.0, which includes the most frequently requested feature: the ability to change the background opacity of the menu. Of course, if you use xfwm4 as your window manager that will remove the drop shadow, but otherwise the feature works nicely.

Another feature added in this release was the inclusion of a small profile picture next to the username. You can set what program is launched to edit your profile when you click it; by default it tries to run the program mugshot.

I also made some changes to make it easier to use. If you add an item to the desktop from the right-click menu it will be made executable by default, so that you can launch it without prompting. Also, when you have the menu hierarchy shown, you can now click on the folders to expand them instead of having to click on the arrows next to the folder names. And finally, you can adjust the amount of recent items shown in the menu if you want more than 10.

In related news, Whisker Menu has become an official Xfce project! You can fetch the release tarballs from archive.xfce.org and the current source from git.xfce.org. It is also now part of the Xfce bug database, so I have closed the GitHub issues.

Enjoy! And, of course, please report any bugs you find.

I have just released a new version of Whisker Menu, version 1.3.0. The biggest feature in this release is probably the addition of search actions, which are inspired by the Xfce application finder’s custom actions. These are useful if you want to perform specific actions by typing something into the search field, and included by default are four example actions that you can change or remove. For instance, one of the default actions allows you to open your default web browser and search Wikipedia by starting your search with !w (eg, !wopen source will show you Wikipedia’s definition of “Open Source”).

This release also has a lot of smaller features, such as the ability to run arbitrary programs from your path by typing the entire program name into the search field. You can also now drag menu items to your panel or desktop if you do not want to use the context menu. Additionally there is more flexibility in configuring the command buttons, as well as the option to hide them if you do not need them. You can also hide the category or menu item icons by setting their size to “None” if you prefer a menu without icons.

I hope you enjoy this release! And, of course, please let me know if you have any issues.

Hi there! This post does not apply to styling the GTK+3 Whisker Menu. For that, read the page on theming.

I have seen several people state that Whisker Menu does not use their GTK theme. This is understandable but completely incorrect. Whisker Menu is a regular window and therefore it matches the GTK theme of regular windows. It can not be a GtkMenu because of the widgets it uses (believe me, I tried), so it does not match the theming of menus.

I did investigate if it would be possible for Whisker Menu to “pick up” the theming of GTK menus and mimic them. Short answer: no. Longer answer: haha, my sanity is worth more than the creaky mess of hacks it would take, and besides I’m fairly certain it still wouldn’t work. So instead I did something much simpler: I named the menu widget itself whiskermenu-window so users or theme makers can play with its appearance as much as they want.

I will not be adding any theme configuration settings to Whisker Menu. First, I really have no interest in doing so. Second, modifying the theme from a .gtkrc file gives you much more power than I could ever expose from a GUI. Third, anything I add would probably interfere with .gtkrc theming.

So, how do you theme Whisker Menu? It’s pretty easy, actually. Open up the hidden file named .gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory with any text editor you want. If the file doesn’t exist, create it. Now, if you want to change the background color of the menu window add something like this:

style "darkback"
{
	bg[NORMAL] = "#404040"
	bg[ACTIVE] = "#606060"
	bg[PRELIGHT] = "#808080"
}
widget "whiskermenu-window*" style "darkback"

If you want to change the window text color as well, add something like this:

style "darkback"
{
	bg[NORMAL] = "#404040"
	bg[ACTIVE] = "#606060"
	bg[PRELIGHT] = "#808080"
	fg[NORMAL] = "#ccc"
	fg[ACTIVE] = "#fff"
	fg[PRELIGHT] = "#fff"
}
widget "whiskermenu-window*" style "darkback"

If you want to change the background color of the menu items, add something like this:

style "darktree"
{
	base[NORMAL] = "#404040"
	base[ACTIVE] = "#606060"
}
widget "whiskermenu-window*TreeView*" style "darktree"

If you want to change the text color of the menu items as well, add something like this:

style "darktree"
{
	base[NORMAL] = "#404040"
	base[ACTIVE] = "#606060"
	text[NORMAL] = "#ccc"
	text[ACTIVE] = "#fff"
}
widget "whiskermenu-window*TreeView*" style "darktree"

These examples just scratch the surface of what you can do with theming from a .gktrc file. I don’t have much experience with it myself, nor do I intend to really look into it further. There are plenty of resources on how to make GTK themes and what they say should be applicable to Whisker Menu as well.