Improving Budgie Menu

[JoshStrobl]

This is a meta task to highlight actionable items that would improve Budgie Menu, make it more flexible for users, and reduce the need for third-party solutions or forks of stuff like Slingshot.

Firstly, the desktop application tracking needs to be improved. While libgmenu / gnome menu has served us well and I'm not really opposed to its continued usage, we do run into circumstances where we unnecessarily rebuild the entire tree before building a new view. This results in a temporary empty view of Budgie and sometimes can be a problem, such as not showing items consistently.

A Budgie Menu update should take into account a desired rearchitecture to only partially manipulations the existing tree, or builds a new tree that contains references to the old one (where unchanged) and new one (new additions, deletions, etc.) and only then pushes it to the menu to be rebuilt.

Alongside this, this centralized "store" in Budgie Menu should be view agnostic. This would enable us to build out alternative views in Budgie Menu, such as an icon grid / icon only view to replace alternatives like Slingshot.

Alongside this, I personally would like to see us default to not having a User Indicator, but rather have that functionality in Budgie Menu as well, which provides familiarity for users of other desktop environments like KDE and MATE + Budgie Menu, as well as Windows users.

[grahammtbr]

My biggest need/want with a launcher/start menu is the ability to for it to remember my most used applications, and rank them higher in search. I believe that Budgie Menu had this once upon a time, and until recently Ubuntu Budgies "Slingshot" launcher had this via Zeitgeist (not sure why that one recently disappeared). Maybe I just need to break my old habits of hitting the super key plus a couple characters and blindly hitting enter, but since the removable of this feature from Slingshot I've done nothing but constantly open wrong apps!

And sorry, I'm not a programmer that can help with this unless you want it written in PHP 😆

[gravityfargo]

The functionality of the GNOME extension "Arc Menu" might be something to base customization functionality on or act as inspiration. This is always the first extension I install while using GNOME.

[chaibronz]

Just realized that the current menu doesn't respect all panel regions if using multiple panels. It will respect the region of the panel it is on, but not any adjacent. This results in the menu potentially overlapping other panels when open. Any chance this could be looked at in the re-write?

Top Panel + Left Panel w/ Menu on Left Panel
Expected behavior: Menu to open below the top panel.

Top Panel + Left Panel w/ Menu on Top Panel
Expected behavior: Menu to open to the right of left panel.