Whisker Menu 1.1.0 released!
Posted on July 25, 2013, under Whisker Menu
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.
23 comments
William Houser says:
July 26, 2013 at 3:49 am
Great! now it’s perfect….don’t do a single thing else to it! PLEASE!!!…lol This is one of those truly awesome little things that works great right up until people start over-engineering it. I love it the way it is, there is nothing else like it. As soon as they start giving out awards for open-source development, I will make sure you’re on the list.
William Houser says:
July 26, 2013 at 5:00 am
well…now I feel a little out-of-sorts. What is the keyboard (terminal) command for the menu? I’m using Manjaro, and I’m felling a bit dumb right now. That plus I’ve been drinking. I really need to stop messing with my Arch-based machines when I’ve been drinking…lol
Graeme says:
July 26, 2013 at 9:21 am
Don’t worry, I don’t plan to add anything to the menu right now. I am very stringent about what features go into projects once I feel they have reached maturity. 🙂
The command to show the menu is “xfce4-popup-whiskermenu”.
William Houser says:
July 27, 2013 at 6:25 am
yea…I found it. When I wrote that post, I hadn’t ran the update yet. I appreciate you getting back to me.
Jörgen says:
August 4, 2013 at 4:25 pm
Thanks, You menu has really improves the usability of XFCE. I have installed this menu on Salix OS and the menu works excellent. Keep up the great work,
wchouser3 says:
August 4, 2013 at 5:29 pm
hey…how hard would it be to get the menu to match either the xfce, or gtk theming?
Graeme says:
August 4, 2013 at 6:44 pm
@Jörgen Thanks, I’m glad you like it!
@wchouser3 It already uses your GTK theme, as it is just regular GTK widgets. If you mean use the styling for menus, that would be impossible to do properly. It isn’t a GtkMenu, it is a GtkWindow with a bunch of child widgets, and trying to apply the styling of a GtkMenu would be a major hack that would most likely not work. Instead, in the git version I have added a widget name (whiskermenu-window) which will allow GTK themes to style Whisker Menu.
Fitoschido says:
August 9, 2013 at 10:21 pm
Graeme, thank you very much for spending your time hacking on this project, even when you’re not fond of GTK+ (I’m not either, by the way). I love this little menu, it’s perfect!
Graeme says:
August 9, 2013 at 10:57 pm
Thanks!
William Houser says:
August 11, 2013 at 4:50 am
I don’t know if you’re aware or not, but threre’s some buzz on the Manjaro forums. Apparently, some people are having some problems. I believe it may be because they’ve compiled it from the AUR, and some of the dependencies which are from the repos were upgraded, were-for they need to re-compile Whisker menu.
William Houser says:
August 11, 2013 at 4:52 am
I’m not having any problems because I always update my AUR builds with my repo updates.
Graeme says:
August 11, 2013 at 9:13 am
In the forum thread that I have been following the users who are having trouble are the ones using the Manjaro built packages, and the users who are not having trouble are the ones building it themselves from the AUR. I’m really not sure what is going on.
William Houser says:
August 12, 2013 at 3:44 am
oh..ok, well in that case they may need tweak something in the pkgbuild. I dunno…mine works fine, I’m running the git version from the AUR
Matteo Marchesi says:
August 12, 2013 at 11:56 am
hello, I’d like to use the rev 1.0 on fedora 17 but on my eeepc with 10” display the menu is too long and I can’t see the entire menu (maybe I’ve too many categories…).
Is there any way to reduce the icons size?
Graeme says:
August 12, 2013 at 1:19 pm
Unfortunately not in version 1.0. I added the ability to change category icon sizes in version 1.1, as well as making the sidebar scroll if it is too tall for the window.
Matteo Marchesi says:
August 12, 2013 at 2:09 pm
Thank you! Is there any easy way (i.e. not compiling) to have the 1.1 on Fedora 17?
Graeme says:
August 12, 2013 at 2:20 pm
I’m not sure. I’m not building packages anymore for Fedora 17 because it reached end-of-life status on July 31st, and the OBS removes build targets for distros that are no longer supported.
William Houser says:
August 12, 2013 at 2:22 pm
you should be able to build it from source. But you really should consider upgrading Fedora.
William Houser says:
August 12, 2013 at 2:24 pm
ok…I see the build targets are not there. Not sure there’s an easy answer without upgrading Fedora, which you should do anyway for security reasons.
Bromigo says:
August 17, 2013 at 1:13 pm
Can you create a plugin for the Avant Window Navigator?
Graeme says:
August 17, 2013 at 1:19 pm
@Bromigo I’m sorry, but I have no interest in supporting anything other than the Xfce panel.
William Houser says:
August 17, 2013 at 11:26 pm
HERE HERE! I can totally agree with that!
SPATRY says:
August 20, 2013 at 1:18 am
I use XFCE but replaced my panel with AWN! I would also love to be able to add this to Avant-Window -Navigator. I am sure a number of my viewers would be interested in having this feature added. Thanks! -Spatry