EasyApps totally rewritten

EasyOS has a few of Roger's (radky in the forum) superb applications, including PupApps, slightly modified by Roger to work with EasyOS and renamed to EasyApps. Apart from the name change, it is still almost entirely PupApps underneath, and is installed at /usr/local/PupApps.

Here is the discussion about PupApps in the old forum:

https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=61962

PupApps caters for all flavours of pups and the code is complicated. I have been thinking about rewriting it for sometime, and today have done it.

EasyApps is three small scripts in /usr/local/easyapps, see commit:

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/a2d9766059d305e2202d9b011bdbadc25a734116

The way it works is to examine the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications, and build a menu that is intended to be simple and more friendly than the large main menu. Here is the main window, with the "Utility" category selected:

Clicking on one of the buttons brings up a sub-menu. This differs from PupApps, which has just one app linked to the button. In the new EasyApps, the sub-menu may have only one app listed, or more, as in the case of clicking on the "System Information" button:

...that is the largest sub-menu; I have kept all the others no more than 3 choices.

I deliberately kept the main window very simple, uncluttered. The choices do not cover everything in the main menu, but do hopefully offer the most popular.

Also, as it dynamically analyses /usr/share/applications at startup, if you have installed any apps, say AppImages, Flatpaks, or via the the PKGget traditional package manager, they will likely get recognised and automatically included in EasyApps -- this dynamic behaviour was one of the reasons I rewrote EasyApps.

Will it work in other pups? Probably yes, except that it uses the 'popup' utility and a lot of icons at /usr/local/lib/X11/mini-icons that will not be in other pups.     

Tags: easy