Popdown

A gtk popup menu launcher. It's a simple application which display a popup menu to let you choose what to launch. Just put your launchers (desktop-files ) in a folder, and it will present them in a speedy popup menu. It's a python app which depends on gtk. Released under the terms of GPL2 licence.

Really handy to use with

• brightside, which let you run popdown when you put your mouse in a corner.
• compiz-fusion, which let you do the same thing as brightside, in the general options.
• run from a panel (a launcher button)
• ...

In fact, it's like 9menu or myGtkMenu, but popdown use freedesktop standards (.desktop files).

Features

• Speed (use a cache, don't need to parse files each time)
• no footprint. It runs only when popup is displayed.
• ability to pass files/urls to a launcher (usefull for drag'n'drop on popdown)
• use standard (freedesktop desktop-files)
• easy to configure
• one simple executable file

Documentation

popdown is a simple command line. You'll just have to give the folder which contains ".desktop" files, and it will popup the result as a popupmenu.

If you want to create submenus, you'll just have to create subfolders in the previous folder, and put ".desktop" files in.

If you use Gnome, you can easily drag'n'drop entry from "gnome application menu" to your popdown folder, to create desktop-files.

popdown provides facilities to manage your menu, as a menu entry in each popdown menu :

• "edit desktop files" : let you edit easily your desktop files.
• "open folder" : let you open your popdown folder
• "refresh" : let you rebuild your menu from fresh data.

Ordering entries

Everything is ordered by name :

• submenus are ordered according the folder's name
• launchers are ordered according "Name"(depends on your locale) entry in the desktop file.

But you can choose to order as you like, if you want

Ordering submenus

You'll just have to rename your folder, like this :

folder "Game" -> folder "2500. Game"

Notes

• you'll need to use the "refresh" entry, to update your popup
• Of course, "2500. " will not be displayed in the menu !

Ordering launchers

You'll just have to add an "order" entry in the desktop files, like this :

[Desktop Entry]
...
order=2500
...

Notes

• you'll need to use the "refresh" entry, to update your popup
• by default, when there are no numbers in front of the name, it will take "5000".

FAQ

Icons are missing in front of labels, what's the hell ?

It's a gnome feature ;-). Run Gconf-editor, and ensure that the key /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons is set to True.

Download

Download Version 0.90

Or do :

$ wget http://manatlan.free.fr/setup/popdown
$ chmod +x popdown

Changelog

V0.90 (31/10/2007) - initial release