Change the color of the blue folders

I don’t know whether this solution was just overlooked or there is a problem wiht it that i haven’t heard of, but i found that you can switch from the blue folders to the originals easily without loosing any entry, so instead of doing it this way:

ln -s ~/config/settings/deskbar/menu ~/config/settings/deskbar/menu_entries

you d’ do it the following way:

ln -s /boot/system/data/deskbar/menu ~/config/settings/deskbar/menu_entries

still working after a reboot.
This should be made automatic during the build process if possible at all or at least easier with just a checkbox or something.

Well, actually it makes no difference, the icon view doesn’t stick, abviously you can’t create new folders and reorganize the menu because the directory where they reside is readonly, so the only thing that changes is the color.
So i’ll change the title to change the color of the blue filders.

Is it possible to get the special Applications and Preferences folder icons in such a way? I currently override the blue folders in order to get a better UI/UX for those folders in the case of the icon view, etc…

Blue folder?

http://besly.de/menu/search/archiv/pref/sort_menu_haiku_nightly_eng.html

We did not create these “blue folders” just for fun or to annoy the users.

Let’s have a look at how this is all built.

[x86_gcc2] /boot/system/data/deskbar# cat menu_entries 
directory /boot/home/config/settings/deskbar/menu
directory /boot/home/config/non-packaged/data/deskbar/menu
directory /boot/home/config/data/deskbar/menu
directory /boot/system/non-packaged/data/deskbar/menu
directory /boot/system/data/deskbar/menu

Yes, “blue folders” are actually plain text files. Tracker does the work of making them look like folders, and to be precise, it makes them look like query results (the same thing you get when using the “find” window). This explains why they get a grey background and no icon view.

So, why did we do this? As you can see from the “cat” result above, we use this to merge the contents of several directories together. It allows the packages to provide menu entries no matter if they are in “system” or “home”, and the user to customize the menu by adding more entries to the “settings” directories (both system-wide and user-local).

The idea was that we would improve support for this in Tracker, but we never got to doing it. In my case, I stopped using the applications menu as a Tracker window and now use LnLauncher for my most needed apps. It is also possible to just open the “real” application dir in Tracker (the one in /boot/system/data/deskbar/menu where most apps will be installed). You can indeed point menu_entries there using a symbolic link if you really want a real folder, but then links from the other 5 folders will be ignored.

Eventually we will review this again to allow categorizing applications, as the current model does not scale well when you have lots of things installed. We have not yet agreed on how this should work, and it will be one of the things to fix after beta1 (but before R1).

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