I’m sorry to disappoint the users who have been requesting this, but after giving it some serious consideration I have decided that I will not be porting Whisker Menu to any other desktop environment. I set out to make a menu for Xfce, and Whisker Menu relies on Xfce quite a lot throughout the codebase. I would have to redesign Whisker Menu to try and support different environments, and even then I would still have to completely rewrite it for some of them as they are Qt based and very little code could be shared between them. Again, sorry, but Whisker Menu will remain Xfce only.

It took me much longer than I expected to make the most recent Whisker Menu release, all because the RPMs would not build. I forgot to include the new manpage in the %files section of the RPM spec file at first, and then every attempt I made to add it did not work. I tried listing the manpage path with %{_mandir}, then just hardcoding the full path, and finally telling it to grab all of the files installed by my package under %{_mandir}.

None of those approaches worked, which left me both baffled and a bit frustrated. And then I noticed I had been forgetting to increase the “Release” number in the spec file. Oops! Such a simple mistake. Once I fixed that they built fine. Long story short, always double check that you increased the “Release” number when you make a change to a RPM spec file!

I have released version 1.2.0 of Whisker Menu. This release contains several smaller but commonly requested features. For those users who wanted subcategories you can now enable loading the menu hierarchy, which will show each category as a tree instead of a flat list. You can also tweak the layout of the menu to be similar to Windows by placing the search entry next to the panel button. Additionally, you can also choose which commands are run when you press the “All Settings”, “Lock Screen”, and “Log Out” buttons. Enjoy!

I have made a new stable release of Whisker Menu, version 1.1.0. This release includes the three most commonly requested features: the ability to show the menu from an external command (which allows for showing the menu from a keyboard shortcut), the ability to have text on the panel button, and finally the ability to switch the categories by hovering for a small time over the category buttons instead of having to click on them.

Another big feature in this release is that I rewrote the search algorithm inspired by that of the Synapse semantic launcher. Whisker Menu will now also search for words and each character instead of just finding exact matches of the text you typed. This allows you to type ff and find both LibreOffice and Firefox. The search results are also now sorted by relevance to make it easier to find what you are looking for. And finally, it now also searches the names of the executables (so you can for example find GNOME’s Document Viewer by searching for evince, as that is the program’s name).

I hope you enjoy this update to the menu! As always, please let me know if you have any issues.

I am really excited and pleased with how popular Whisker Menu is turning out to be! It has already been added to some Linux distros, and both Manjaro and the Xfce edition of Linux Mint have made it the default menu! That is amazing, and I still can’t believe it. Thank you to all of those who have spread the word, reported bugs, and submitted translations!