Crap, another package I want turns out to be another piece of abandonware I have to swipe from Debian: desklaunch. The Makefile is a fixer-upper, but there's only a single C file to compile, and the manpage was written by a Debian maintainer, not the author.
One edit of the Makefile, and it works. And it's as destructively buggy with its rc file as I remember it being.
Oh. It does have a homepage: https://www.oroborus.org/
Interestingly enough, both the source code downloads and the changelog links are from Debian's repo.
Also, because the site hasn't been updated in almost seven years, some of the links have gone stale.
Wait a minute. If I'm going to use wmx as my window manager, I don't really need a separate desktop menu application, no matter how lightweight.
I can put shell scripts and symlinks in ~/.wmx/ with subdirectories dictating submenu arrangement (and `ln -s .. <submenu-name>` to have a navigation aid), then middle-click-hold to access them in organized menu form! Whatever's there that has +x set gets menu-fied.
All right, practical desktop minimalism is a go!
Well, I suppose I could keep deskmenu for when I'm too lazy to hold down the scroll wheel, and I could also use dmenu for when I'm too lazy even to take a hand off the keyboard.
I'm getting desklaunch and deskmenu mixed up. Note to self: See about patching desklaunch to never open ~/.desklaunchrc for writing. Why does it even need to, when its comments & readme explicitly tell users to throw a text editor at the rc?
Well, it turns out all I had to do to save the hard work put into my ~/.desklaunchrc file was neuter a single function.
Have a pair of patch files for desklaunch 1.1.8, one with debugging output on, the other with debugging output off: http://files.thornton2.com/packages/unix/desklaunch-patches-1.1.8.tar.gz
desklaunch works, and my patch works very well, but deskmenu breaks in that menu items in a submenu do nothing when I follow the manpage instructions. I really, really don't want to take over, fix, or even hack-patch the whole oroborus project.
I remember the age when doing this, adding between a few hundred and a few thousand kilobytes (KB), was considered reckless desktop bloat.
How far we've come, when it's not considered bloat unless it's measured in gigabytes, six orders of magnitude larger.