Removing unwanted menu items under xfce?

[Otto Kratik]

I recently did a fresh install of Qubes R3.2, and then proceeded to restore several VM's from my previous installation, among them a Windows 7 HVM. I also installed qubes-windows-tools, which I also previously had installed.

As a result of that restore/install, xfce has placed about 50 win7-related app shortcuts in both the win7 sub-menu of the start menu (expected and desired) and also simultaneously into the "System Tools" sub-menu of the start menu (not wanted), intermingled among the normal items one usually expects to find there (terminal, file manager etc).

KDE is not affected, and logging into that environment shows the proper expected behavior: win7 shortcuts in the win7 sub-menu only, and system tools shortcuts where they belong.

What is the easiest way to edit the entries appearing under the System Tools sub-menu of xfce, so as to remove the approximately 50 win7-related shortcuts that I don't want appearing there?

Thanks..

[Unman]

I'm sorry you had to go through that.
The Xfce menu is at /etc/xdg/menus/xfce-applications.menu

If you examine that file you will see a section for a submenu - System
That should contain exclusions - X-Qubes-VM is one.
If you were to comment out that line you would find the System Tools
submenu filled with entries for the VMs on your system. (Try it.)
From the fact that you only have the win7 files there, my guess would
be that those entries don't have this category.

The entries here are taken from the desktop files in
~/.local/share/applications
Have a look at the win7 files and see what category is set:
you can edit the file to add X-Qubes-VM to the Categories list and check
that the entry no longer appears in the System menu.

These files are based on those in /var/lib/qubes/ - look in the
apps directory under the HVM.
You may see some common Category that you could add to the menu
exclusions - otherwise it's a matter of adding the missing category
to the desktop files which you could do with awk or sed.

I believe there are gui tools to manage the menu, but I dont have any
experience with them

Hope this helps

unman

[raah...@gmail.com]

wonder why that happened. I'm not sure you have to reinstall qubes windows tools when restoring the windows7 vm. I haven't had any issues.