Customizing obmenu for Openbox

January 16, 2023

So I wanted a pipe menu for my Openbox installation. I tried out several options, and obmenu-generator is the only one that worked for me.

This is how you install it in Arch or any Arch-based Linux distribution:

sudo pacman -S obmenu-generator

You can implement it right away adding this line:

<menu id="DynamicMenu_01" label="System applications" execute="obmenu-generator" />

to the ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml file, then restarting Openbox.

The “file manager” launcher was broken for me, it launched DosBox instead of thunar. Anyway, many menus both above and below the “categories” menus proper are just obmenu’s additions. To get rid of those, add this line instead:

<menu id="DynamicMenu_01" label="System applications" execute="sh -c &quot;obmenu-generator | sed '/Advanced Settings/,/Exit/d;2,6d;/separator/d'&quot; " />

This will trim everything except the applications menus proper. This way you will end up having just the applications’ menus, without all the stuff added by obmenu. Enjoy!

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