I want to be able to somehow group or organize applications in the QMenu/VM-sub-menu to keep the commonly used applications grouped together. Sub-Categories like Video Processing, Document Processing, Software Development, Network Management, etc. Because of wearing many hats each day my VM menus get really long, and finding a specific app is not always easy and wastes time as I search alphabetically down the menu trying to remember the first letters of the app name. Does it have the company name first, or some other acronym, or just the App file name itself? I often switch modes from Development, to Writing, to Research and back again, within the same VM and the same day, and it doesn’t really make sense to create separate VMs for each duty just to be able to shorten the menu. It would be much easier if apps were grouped by category, then by name alphabetically within that category.
I have tried using Apps like Alacarte and even nano/Gedit to directly edit titles in the desktop files ( e.g. “Documents - PdfEdit” instead of “PdfEdit”), and yet the default Qubes menu system ignores any and all attempts to get them relisted alphabetically by any other desktop file title.
The Qubes menu already uses its submenu for each VM, and creating aditional folders under that architecture with Alacarte does not actually add any submenus no matter how/where it is done in the Template, Dom0, Nor the VM itself. A third layer in the default Qmenu system does not seem possible. Separators or moving items up and down the list to group things also does not seem possible. Editing each individual Desktop file title name in all the Templates is even ignored.
I have no clue what the main Qmenu is actually using to decide how to sort the names in its lists for each VM. There must be a way to do this without editing the Templates desktop files, or menu files, on the file system that would just get rewritten by qvm-sync-appmenus anyway.
Shouldn’t there be a way to organize the menus for a specific VM using some kind of tagging system so it doesn’t need to be redone when swapping/updating templates? There must be a way to do a simple sort by a user defined value, group applications, create a submenu, or define a way to view commonly used apps together. Editing the desktop files in the Template seems like the wrong approach, and even then the QubesManager/Settings/Applications tab and the Qmenu can’t even agree on the same order of presentation.
Would SaltStack be good for recreating a user-defined menu structure after software updates or template upgrades? There must be a way to organize these VM menus.
What am I missing here?