In the mean time, I've built it on my OBS: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show … gmenumaker if people want an easy download. My package adds a trigger on /usr/share/applications, and a corresponding postinst script:

#!/bin/sh
# xdgmenumaker postinst

case "$1" in
   triggered)
      Xvfb :18 &
      result=$!
      export DISPLAY=:18
      for word in fluxbox ;
      do
         /usr/bin/xdgmenumaker -f "${word}" -i > "/etc/xdgmenumaker/${word}" 2>/dev/null
      done
      kill $result
      ;;
   *)
      :
      ;;
esac

Which could easily be adapted to just run for any set of WMs.

A weakness this has, is that it is run as root, and therefore will not make a single suitable fluxbox menu file that also reads the users' $XDG_DATA_DIR or similar values. So in my ~/.fluxbox/startup file I have:

/usr/bin/xdgmenumaker -f fluxbox -i > ~/.fluxbox/xdg-menu &

And of course in ~/.fluxbox/menu

[begin] (fluxbox)
[include] (.fluxbox/xdg-menu)
#[include] (/etc/xdgmenumaker/fluxbox)
[include] (/etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu)
[end]

https://github.com/gapan/xdgmenumaker

this is not possible with icewm or windowmaker, AFAICT.

icewm can be kept up to date, but i think it has to be restarted then (with x and your applications still running.)

i have used openbox but i dont know exactly what "on the fly" means in this context, so i dont know if icemw is capable of the same. it can be triggered after apt installs new programs.

"MenuMaker is a menu generation utility for X window managers on *NIX systems. It is capable of finding lots of installed programs and generating a root menu consistent across all supported X window managers, so one will get (almost) the same menu no matter which window manager is used."

I personally use Fluxbox and I have half-heartedly tried to use various projects and gave up. I guess application discovery just wasn't that important for my use cases.

Here are the examples for a project named "xdg-menu" from the Arch Wiki.

EDIT: openbox can generate XDG menus on-the-fly using the openbox-menu package and this pipemenu entry:

<menu id="applications-menu" label="Applications" execute="/usr/bin/openbox-menu -i lxde-applications.menu"/>

But this is not possible with icewm or windowmaker, AFAICT.

I've been questioning #debian these days with this matter but since I got no answer I thought I should ask here too.

I am looking for a solution to have the menus in icewm and windowmaker show the same apps the "modern" DEs show (XFCE, LXQT, ...). The menus in icewm and windowmaker look very strange, some (many) apps are missing, instead there are useless items like xclock, xeyes, ...

This is what I found out so far:
- there are two "standards", the old one is using the entries in /usr/share/menu
- the new standard (or the XDG one) is using the entries in /usr/share/applications

What I tried:
- I installed menu and menu-xdg
- I ran update-menus

But the menus look just like before. The thing is, I don't need at all the old standard, I just want the XDG one. I don't need to see in the menu xclock and xeyes, I don't use them anyway

And now a little rant: on my laptop I use Mageia, it's a very nice distro, too bad that systemd ruins it. Windowmaker and icewm look wonderful there, the menus are "XDG-only", but I can't figure out how they did it. They don't even have a /usr/share/menu directory!

Hopefully someone will have a clue about this. Thanks!