Linux Desktop Hacks

130

|

Chapter 5, KDE Desktop

#40 Create Your Own KDE Right-Click Menu Actions

HACK

Save this script to a file such as immail.sh and run it, like so:

foo@bar:~$ ./immail.sh bob

This script works by first making the command-line argument available as

the

$nick variable. After this, a while loop is started that uses grep to search

for the chosen nick in

$nick within the output of the reachableContacts

interface in KopeteIface. Nick is not online, so the process will just sleep for

10 seconds. When Nick does come online, an email is sent to [e-mail]

using the

mail command.

HACK

#40

Create Your Own KDE Right-Click

Menu Actions Hack #40

Create custom menu actions for when you right-click a file, directory, or

group of files and/or directories.

When you use KDE, do you ever find yourself having to click too many

times to do a simple operation, or resort to opening up a terminal to do a

task at the command line that should have been a no-brainer feature of

KDE? Now you can add your own features to KDE context menus. Right-

click a file and click Action

➝ Make Executable to make the file executable.

Right-click an empty space in a folder and click Action

➝ Create a new Bash

Script to open an editor and fill in the first line. This is a very cool hack

because you can create a context menu to launch scripts or programs writ-

ten in any language. It is especially powerful if you learn DCOP scripting

[Hack #39]. That way you can use the context menu selection to control KDE

programs.

Remember all the times you wrote a dandy new bash script and created an

icon to launch it, but when you clicked it, it didn’t run? Instead, it popped

up in an editor, because you forgot to make the script executable. With this

hack, you can create a script to make your file executable by right-clicking

its icon and selecting Actions

➝ Make file executable (see Figure 5-4). It

takes much less time than traditional methods.

All you have to do to create the context menu that will make a file execut-

able is create a text file formatted very much like an application link, and

then drop it in a special directory. We’ll start by creating a file called make_

executable.desktop. Start up your favorite editor, and enter the following

text:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

ServiceTypes=application/x-shellscript

Actions=MakeExe

Create Your Own KDE Right-Click Menu Actions #40

Chapter 5, KDE Desktop

|

131

HACK

[Desktop Action MakeExe]

Name=Make file executable

Exec=chmod +x %f

Icon=kfm

Save your work. The action this file takes is defined by the entry Exec=chmod

+x %f

. KDE substitutes the name of the selected file for %f. If you want to

make this feature available to everyone who uses KDE on this computer,

place the file here:

# cp make_executable.desktop <path to kde>/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus

Depending on your Linux distribution, the path might not be tied to your

KDE directory. It might be /usr/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus.

If you simply want to make this feature available to yourself, place the file

here (assuming your KDE settings are kept in ~/.kde; your distribution might

use ~/.kde3.3 or something similar):

$ cp make_executable.desktop ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus

The ServiceTypes field in the file is set to the mime-type

application/x-shellscript, which means the menu option will

be available only when you right-click a shell script file.

Figure 5-4. Context-sensitive Actions menu