Hey all,
Does anyone know if there's anything similar to xdg-menu [0] for Wayland?
I know most compositors have some sort of menu -- how are they typically handling entries in menus?
I suspect it's compositor-specific, but I'm curious in case that's not the case.
I'm asking because #CoW could benefit from that.
Oct 8, 2026, 9:07 PM
Oct 8, 2026, 10:11 PM@thomasadam It's in the FreeDesktop.org specifications. I have some proof-of-concept C++ code that sort-of parses it, but basically the procedure is:
- parse the `.desktop` files (INI-style format), extract out the category information as a set, plop those in a list.
- parse the `.menu` files (XML), processing the `<include>` and `<exclude>` tags to select `.desktop` entries to put in each menu.
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/menu-spec/
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/
I did a crude proof-of-concept using glibmm / libxml++ but I really need to clean it up properly and put a decent UI on it before I release it.
@stuartl This is a shame -- and sounds like a nightmare which no one should solve in this way...
Hmm.
Oct 8, 2026, 11:17 PM@thomasadam Yeah, well, it is what it is.
The things is, it is doable and I got a half-working proof-of-concept going.
The real hard bit actually is finding an appropriate toolkit to do the UI in. Years ago, Qt would have been my "go to" with wxWidgets being a close second, but not now as they huff the LLM slop.
https://gist.github.com/sjlongland/06b4a0802318cfbe189df4cda3e909de is the code I have now. There's a lot more to do, but that's the start I've made on it.