.desktop Files and KMenuEdit

In an attempt to properly evaluate the IDE that we'll be using, I pulled down the final release of NetBeans 4.0, and installed it. I then went to load it, which in my case meant going to the KDE menu (on my SuSE box). I found the menu item for NetBeans, but assumed that it was still pointing to my old install, 4.0b2.

So I went to SuSE's Control Center, and tried to remember where they put the config tool for changing the menu. It's hidden under the 2nd or 3rd tab under Panels (which only makes sense if you really strain hard; in this area, Windows has it nice, just right-click on the menu item to edit it). Anyway, I then click the Edit K Menu button, which brings up KMenuEdit.

Only KMenuEdit doesn't show any entries under Development/IDE, which is where I have both NetBeans and Eclipse. Both show up on the KMenu, but neither do under KMenuEdit. I search the KDE bug database, and it appears that this is a SuSE bug, already fixed in a later version. (Mighty nice to be able to search a product's bug database.)

So where does KDE store this info? Apparently in .desktop files. I found netbeans.desktop in /usr/share/applications, updated to reflect the newly installed app. I'm guessing that the installer took care of that, pleasantly enough. The Eclipse one, that I added manually, was in ~/.local/share/applications/Eclipse.desktop.

So, it turned out that I needn't have gone to this trouble, but I figured I'd post this in case others have this difficulty, or are new to KDE and are curious.