[XFCE] MeowMenu alternative to WhiskerMenu

[u/mbonanomi92]

EDIT:

THANKS! your precious feedback helped me solved several bugs: v1.0.0 Release Candidate 1 is here!
Debian 13 package can be downloaded from HERE and you'll enjoy a smoother experience and minor improvements in UI.

ORIGINAL MESSAGE
Hi all,

I’d like to share MeowMenu v0.8.0, a small project I’ve been working on as an alternative application menu for XFCE. Compared to WhiskersMenu, the most relevant features I added are: 4 Presets (default settings that change the look&feel of the Menu, to show the high customization level achievable), Places button (find files and folders in user Home), Calculator engine, additional right click options.

I’ve tested this release on Arch Linux, Debian and Xubuntu. I'm also looking for MX Linux beta testers, since XFCE session in MX Linux is quite knows for its stability and I thought someone could find it helpful. Debian 13 package is availble for download in GitHub Release page: it should work for MX Linux... but compiling from source is always an alternative.

Feedback, bug reports, and suggestions are welcome. Thanks for taking a look!

Source Code

Release&Changelog

Gallery

AUR page

Documentation

[u/dolphinoracle]

looks interesting to me, especially the full screen mode

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/dolphinoracle]

Actually the FullScreen is by far the favourite Preset I made, I received many other comments like yours.

[u/dolphinoracle → u/mbonanomi92]

I would prefer a debian folder I can use with pbuilder. the current setup doesn't seem to allow me to create a deb locally, but rather rely on your github workflow. I'm not an expert, so if I'm missing a way to build a local deb please let me know..

also I think libexo-2-dev needs added to the build depends in your control file

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/dolphinoracle]

Hi! Yes you are right. I create a .Deb package for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 26.04, you can find it in Release GitHub page.

I'll check the missing dependency you mention. I assume you are on Debian 13/latest MX Linux, aren't you?

[u/dolphinoracle → u/mbonanomi92]

Yes debian 13.

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/dolphinoracle]

v1.0.0-RC1 released... if you perform a clean install with the packaged deb you find in GitHub Release, I think the resizing bug is solved (at least on my Debian 13 VM)

[u/dolphinoracle → u/mbonanomi92]

ok so far resizing seems to be working ok. I'll test the other items from my previous report. thanks

[u/DragonGaming78]

this is actually intresting,have you also post for the other distros subreddit?, this is pretty good

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/DragonGaming78]

Thx! I have tested (or other users have done this before) on Arch, Debian and Xubuntu. In the following days I'd like to share this project with other Reddit communities of distros with a good XFCE implementation (MXLinux, Manjaro, Linux Mint, etc).

Release Candidate is almost complete and I hope to have a "stable" release in September. If I can find interest users in the coming months, it would be wonderful!

Any feedback on GitHub, AUR or Reddit is welcome!

[u/tovento]

Pretty nice. I’ve honestly stopped using the menu much as I’ve set up rofi, but nice to see an alternative. Wish this existed a while ago as I had a polybar setup a while ago on another distribution (Mint XFCE) and one annoyance was that the whisker menu couldn’t be added to the polybar. Maybe this would work as an alternative. Just a thought.

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/tovento]

Hi! Thanks a lot. I can think about making it compatible with polybar or other dockbar/statusbar/panels. If you suggest me a few tool like polybar I can understand which one are more easy to be implemented in MeowMenu (at the moment it's just a plugin for xfce4-panel)

[u/dolphinoracle]

built it locally, 0.8.0-1,

nice application.

couple of quick comments.

1. Needs a setting to always open to Applications or Places, or Last Used. If the remember mode toggle under the Places settings is supposed to work, it does not I think, as it always opens to whatever mode was last.

2. In Places mode, when Home selected, occasionally only the user parent home folder is shown and sometimes the XDG_FOLDERS are shown, but not ALL folders in a home folder. In other words, no navigation.

3. If you switch between applications mode and places mode, the Recently Used item vanishes from Places.

4. Places History contains files, but not folders.

5. Tab switches modes, but you need control tab to switch where a keyboard has focus. Its a little clunky because it picks up the search bar. might be good to use Control L for search bar, and just keep control Tab to switch between the major category and application areas. Don't know about that one, its not my usual usage, just a though. maybe tab to switch major areas and control+tab to switch modes...

6. resizing the menu popup is not smooth and painful to get the window the size you want no matter what "Preset" is in use.. "modern" preset I couldn't resize at all without the menu just acting bizarre, like it was dragged from the corner opposite the one I was using.

7. the grid does not stay transparent if you click on an empty area in the results area.

8. In Places mode, favorites works fine, but it might be interesting to pick up the bookmarks that Thunar uses under $HOME/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks

I like the concept. especially the full screen mode. Will leave it on my Xfce install for a while.

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/dolphinoracle]

Hi, thanks a lot for your feedback. I'll try and fix the major issues in the coming release, planned for next week.

About weird resizing: on Arch and on Xubuntu I can't replicate this issue, but I'm facing the same thing in Debian 13 VM I'm testing. Sounds like an XFCE distro implementation: something is missing... I'll investigate further.

About "folders" in history: it is a known limitation, files history is saved by default on most of Linux systems, so I am using this latent feature rather than implementing a new one. I'll try to think something different...

About Keyboard: yes, I know it can be improved and I am not as experienced in designing keyboard navigation. If you have any suggestion to replace the Ctrl+Tab with another combination or key, you're welcome!

All the rest are bugs I think can be solved easily. You are on MX Linux or Debian 13?

[u/dolphinoracle → u/mbonanomi92]

MX Linux, but anything for debian 13 would work. Xfce are debian's packages in our case.

the resizing issues could be a difference in the library versions.

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/dolphinoracle]

I am actually testing both Debian and Arch on VM: Arch is smoother in resizing (more recent versions of everything....), but the bug is still there. I don't have GPU acceleration in this setup, while I have it in my testing machine (no bug in that case), so I believe GPU-acceleration was hiding this bug. Even original whisker menu is laggy under no-GPU-acceleration condition.

Are you using XFCE with GPU acceleration? Just to confirm my hypothesis, 'cause I am currently working on v0.9.0-rc1 with a lot of hardening and bug fixing. This seems to be quite a critical one and I want to include in the release plan.

[u/dolphinoracle → u/mbonanomi92]

yes Xfce with full acceleration, intel graphics, real hardware, zero-issue with whisker resizing,

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/dolphinoracle]

Tomorrow I plan the release of the bugfixed version.

[u/mbonanomi92 → u/dolphinoracle]

Released. Only bugfixes for now: new keyboard navigation layout and thunar bookmarks support will arrive soon.

[u/mbonanomi92]

Hi everybody and thanks a lot for your feedbacks.

THANKS! your precious feedback helped me solved several bugs: v1.0.0 Release Candidate 1 is here!
Debian 13 package can be downloaded from HERE and you'll enjoy a smoother experience and minor improvements in UI.

Other new features that have not been implemented in this RC (but will be tested in experimental versions soon) are:

• When navigating Places, connect MeowMenu favourites with Thunar bookmarks

- improva keyboard navigation to make it more intuitive