Debian Menu System - chapter 4
How a user can override the menus


4.1 Configuring the menus

A user can specify his/her own menu entries in the ~/.menu directory. The files can have an arbitrary file name as long as the new syntax for the menu entries is used. They should start with either
  ?package(installed-package):
or
  ?package(local.mystuff):
if it's something that isn't ``debian-officially'' installed. (Any ``package'' that starts with ``local.'' is considered installed.)

If you are using the old format, the menu entry files should have names of installed packages or have to be called ``local.name''. (Note, that due to a bug in menu-1.3 this did not work then.)

Files including entries with the old syntax either have to use names of installed packages or have to be named local.name, since update-menus assumes any "package" who's name starts with "local" is installed.

If a user wants to have his/her own menu methods, he/she should create a ~/.menu-methods directory and put all scripts he/she wants to be run in it. (If ~/.menu-methods exists, /etc/menu-methods will not be searched when a user runs update-menus).

A system admin should place system-wide menu entries in /etc/menu (not in /usr/lib/menu/package, since these files will probably be overwritten by a package upgrade).


4.2 Specifying a ``no-menu entry''

If a user wants to remove an entry from the system menu (in /etc/menu), then this will do the trick:
  echo -n  > ~/.menu/package
The zero-size file will tell update-menus that the corresponding package should not have any menu entries listed.


4.3 Include: (one) other feature

More out of curiosity than anything else, I recently read the KDE mailinglist. In it I saw some discussion about how good the Debian menu system is (whow, thanks, guys!), but one person found a missing feature: s/he said you couldn't include other files in the user menufiles. Well, actually, it was already possible, but not very well advertised. To include the contents of file /usr/lib/menu/somefile, add this to your menufile:
!include /usr/lib/menu/somefile

Debian Menu System - Copyright ©1997 Joost Witteveen, Joey Hess, Christian Schwarz.
Contents; abstract; next; back.
version 1.3, 20 November 1998
Joost Witteveen joostje@debian.org
Joey Hess joey@kite.ml.org
Christian Schwarz schwarz@debian.org