KDE 4 Service Menu Editor

You would have thought that it would be possible to edit the KDE Service Menu (the menu that you see when you right-click on an entry in a Dolphin or Konqueror window) or add your own commands to it. However, this is not a feature of KDE 4 to date (June 2011). Fortunately, KDE developer David Edmundson produced a handy GUI utility to do just this. His blog post KDE Service Menu Editor and KDE-Apps.org entry give the details.

I hope this utility will become part of KDE in a future release, but, until it does, below I explain how I installed it in KDE 4.6.2 for Sabayon Linux. The same procedure should apply in the case of Gentoo Linux.

1. Download kservicemenueditor-0.2a.tar.gz and extract it to ~/kservicemenueditor-0.2a/

2. N.B. This step is distribution-dependent, and may not be necessary for your distribution. Use the following command to determine whether or not you need to perform this edit:

$ kde4-config --path data

If the above command returns the following paths:

/home/fitzcarraldo/.kde4/share/apps/:/usr/share/apps/

then edit setup.py and change the line:

    ('share/kde4/apps/servicemenueditor', glob.glob("*.ui")),

to:

    ('share/apps/servicemenueditor', glob.glob("*.ui")),

3. To install KDE Service Menu Editor:

$ cd ~/kservicemenueditor-0.2a/
$ su
Password:
# ./setup.py install
# exit
exit
$

4. To launch the utility, either run it on the command line from your normal user account:

$ servicemenueditor

or double-click the Desktop Configuration File servicemenueditor.desktop (which you can place on your Desktop or in any other directory).

5. Usage example:

Let’s assume you want to make a right-click menu for compressing a file with GZip. In that case you would carry out the steps listed below.

1. Launch servicemenueditor.
2. Click ‘Add’.
3. In the box type the name “compress” (without the quotes) and click ‘OK’.
4. Click on the ‘Conditions’ tab and select ‘All Files’ as you want to be able to work on all files.
5. Click the ‘Action’ tab and enter “Compress Files” (without the quotes) in the ‘Label’ box. This is what will appear in the ‘Actions’ Menu.
6. Click on the blank icon and select an icon of your choice.
7. In the ‘Exec’ box, type the command needed. For this example “gzip %u” would be the command.