Creating a sensible applications menu

I would like an app that provides a sensible, rational, intuitive interface for editing the apps menu.

In my case, I (at first) simply wanted to have an ebooks category that would include all the tools I use for ebooks instead of having, e.g., calibre relegated to “Other.”

Then I realized that none of the menu categories I had become acclimated to actually made any sense. “Utilities,” for instance, is an absolute dog’s breakfast of completely unrelated applications. And a TeX category would be very useful for me.

So I would like to see a menu system with many more categories than the default, with an easy option to create more submenus (e.g., Python, Mathematics, Ebooks, Statistics, Elearning).

Oddly, there does not seem to be any application in the Linux universe that does this, and those that seem to be close to what I want (alacarte, menulibre) are ridiculously short of full functionality.

So far, the best resources I’ve found are https://linux.die.net/man/1/xdg-desktop-menu and https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=12235, which require a lot of labor. See also this very long post: https://raywoodcockslatest.wordpress.com/2019/12/27/edit-peppermint-menu/

I’ve decided to edit the completely unorganized and illogical .desktop and .directory files in gnome to make them do what I want.

If this interests anyone else, I will share my results and/or create a Python script that will allow easy customization of the Fedora Gnome apps menu in ~/.local/share, /usr/share/applications, or whatever other locations I may discover.

It is very simple to create folders and place apps into those folders in the gnome activity menu. If you have 2 different apps that are not in a folder and you want a folder that contains those apps then drag one on top of the other and a folder will automatically be created that contains both. You can edit the folder title as well.

I find no need to modify the tools that are already available.

Note that I am referencing the activities menu available with super+A and not the activities menu at the upper right. I don’t use that menu.