How do I access the Lubuntu menu in Openbox?

Question

Is there a way to include the Lubuntu applications menu in an Openbox menu (~/.config/openbox/menu.xml) so I can use it within a pure Openbox session?

Answer 1

lxpanel use .desktop files for menu and openbox use xml(menu.xml) so you need a converter, for example: http://obmenugen.sourceforge.net/

Generates a full menu for openbox using the information present in *.desktop files (with static content or dinamically generated).

Answer 2

What you need is a Pipe menu.

A pipe menu is a dynamic menu item that is created by a program every time the menu is opened.

There are multiple programs that can create a pipe menu of the installed applications. Here is a list of featured pipe menus from Openbox.org.

Since you use Lubuntu you would most likely be interested in openbox-menu. It uses the menu cache of LXDE to create the application menu. There is a Ubuntu package here. I don't know if it is in the official repository, you should check that.

To use a pipe menu you need to edit your Openbox menu file at ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml.

In your menu file you need to add a new menu item under your root-menu that looks like this

<menu id="desktop-app-menu"
      label="Applications"
      execute="<path-to-exec>/openbox-menu" />

You will need to replace <path-to-exec> which the path to openbox-menu. You can get the path with

type openbox-menu

Then you will have a new menu item labeled Applications in your Openbox menu.

It you never edited your menu.xml take a look at the menu documentation from Openbox.