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I just recently switched to Fedora 15 with Gnome 3 and the Gnome Shell, but I haven't been able to successfully change the Applications menu shortcuts and groupings. I've tried both the alacarte application and manually editing the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications/ but both either do nothing or create duplicate applications.

I don't want to change any launch options or more complicated features, I'm just looking for the best way to remove applications from the list without uninstalling, add and remove categories (ie. remove Universal Access and add Wine), and move applications into different categories (like Tweak Settings into System Tools or Eclipse into Office). Getting Alacarte to work correctly seems like the best solution, but it seems like it hasn't been designed for gnome-shell.

I am running dual boot Windows 7 and Fedora 15 with Gnome 3 and Gnome-Shell, kernel 2.6.38.8-32.fc15.i686.

Thanks

1 Answer 1

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You can edit the file /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu to change the structure of the applications menu (re-order, add, remove, edit sections of the applications menu). In this file you will see your applications menu in XML structure and referencing .directory files - these are the application category definition files and can usually be found at /usr/share/desktop-directories. (Changes to these files are global, for user specific changes see paths at the bottom)

To remove applications from a grouping you should be able to remove that grouping's name from the Category section of the .desktop file for each application you want to remove from the category. To add an application to a grouping simply add the grouping's name to the Category section of the application's .desktop file. (Note that the name is not always what you expect, for example the group 'Internet' is really 'Network' - inspect the .directory files to double-check the name of the grouping you need)

To remove a "grouping" or category altogether you can remove its entire section from the applications.menu file mentioned above.

To ensure Gnome uses the locations mentioned above for these configuration files, set the environment variable:

$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/etc/xdg 

(Note that without a value in $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, Gnome looks at the following directories for user-specific application menu settings:

~/.config/menus
~/.local/share/applications
~/.local/share/desktop-directories

Also, check out this page for more information:

http://library.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/menustructure-13.html.en

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