I really like the new Qubes Application Menu. But with lots of qubes, it would be better if I could see more entries without having to scroll. I’m not sure if what I did counts as best practice or if it would survive an update, so I’m posting it here instead of in the Community Guides section.
All commands are in dom0. My monitors don’t have scaling/HiDPI, so I don’t know how it would work with them.
I can’t make a screenshot of the menu itself, but you can test it yourself and see if you like it.
Make the entries for the different qubes much more compact:
This file has CSS for the menu:
/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/qubes_menu/qubes-menu-base.css
I made a copy of it before changing it:
sudo cp /usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/qubes_menu/qubes-menu-base.css /usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/qubes_menu/qubes-menu-base.css.old-2024-10-30
I changed some of the paddings to 1px and then reloaded the qubes-app-menu:
ps -ef | grep qubes-app-menu
sudo kill -9 <PID_of_the_menu>
/usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/qubes-app-menu --background
I sometimes needed to add " &" after the last command, as I didn’t get back to the prompt
It seems to work great. Later I made a few other tweaks, but it’s just CSS and there’s no point in discussing specific changes, as every user will likely have different preferences.
Increase the height of the menu to take up all the available vertical space:
This file also has CSS for the menu:
/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/qubes_menu/qubes-menu.glade
I made a copy of it before changing it:
sudo cp /usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/qubes_menu/qubes-menu.glade /usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/qubes_menu/qubes-menu.glade.old-2024-10-30
I changed the default-height from 740 to the height of my monitor and then reloaded the qubes-app-menu like before.
If the XFCE panel with the App Menu icon is at the bottom, the user would have to move their mouse to the top to reach the different buttons and qube and app links. A solution would be to increase the height with the available number of entries, but soon enough I’ll have enough qubes to fill the whole height, anyway. Another solution would be to make the lists of qubes and apps start from the bottom, not the top, and to place the different buttons (apps, templates, service, etc.) near the bottom, too.
I don’t know how to reduce the width of the column on the left with the buttons (search, qubes, favorites, settings), but that’s not very important.
Any ideas are appreciated. 