[SOLVED] Native Dialogs in Xubuntu, yahoo!

[g.salmeri]

Hello everybody.

I have been using Softmaker Office for at least 10 years and as a Linux Xubuntu user I have been always very satisfied. Only one annoyance, perhaps objectively minor but big in my eyes: the lack of support for native dialogs for XFCE/Xubuntu (I remember that long time ago the support was dropped, leaving only Gnome and KDE). Well, yesterday I discovered that in fact SoftMaker Office *does* support native dialogs at least in Xubuntu, at least in my configuration: it is sufficient to let it believe that the current DE is Gnome (whose dialogs are identical to those of XFCE, being both based on GTK). One can try that by giving in a terminal a command like this:

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DESKTOP_SESSION=gnome textmaker18

In order to avoid this rather clumsy way of starting the programs, it is sufficient to modify the three .desktop files like this:

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Exec=sh -c "DESKTOP_SESSION=gnome /usr/bin/textmaker18 %F"

And similarly for Planmaker and Presentation .desktop files.They are in the two folders /usr/local/share/applications and /usr/share/applications.

One warning: DO NOT EVEN TRY, instead of this, to set the DESKTOP_SESSION variable in your .profile! This will freeze your session and brick your computer!

I repeat: I do not know if this works also for other XFCEs and also for configurations different from mine, but for me all seems perfect. Anyway, a quick test with the command from the Terminal cannot harm anything.

Any comment from the the developers? Are they aware of any terrible side-effect I am missing?

[Michael Uplawski]

This will freeze your session and brick your computer

While bricking a “computer“ is an option for machines running embedded systems that are difficult to access in other ways than those suggested by the system, I deem the above statement a blatant exaggeration of no informational value.
(and this the best comment ever published on the whole Web).

[g.salmeri]

I deem the above statement a blatant exaggeration of no informational value.

I wrote that phrase in a joking manner, I thought it was evident, sorry. (The rest of my post is not a joke, though.)

[martin-k]

"Native" dialogs are simply Gnome dialogs. In your situation, you use Xfce but have the Gnome libraries installed.

Adding "-gui:gnome" to the command line of TextMaker should also do the trick.

[g.salmeri]

Adding "-gui:gnome" to the command line of TextMaker should also do the trick.

Yes, it works perfectly! So I reinvented the wheel... I have just found the thread https://forum.softmaker.de/viewtopic.ph ... 4&p=116949 in the German forum where the issue has been already touched. Thank you for the hint!

[g.salmeri]

Addendum: for those who want to use it, I have written a little shell script for inserting the -gui:gnome option in the .desktop files (I guess it is needed after every program update):

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#! /bin/sh
for d in /usr/local/share/applications /usr/share/applications; do
for e in $d/textmaker* $d/planmaker* $d/presentations*; do
sed -i 's/^Exec=\([^-]*\) %F/Exec=\1 -gui:gnome %F/' $e
done
done

It requires root privileges. Name it e.g. "adjust.sh" and execute with "sudo sh adjust.sh". Use at your own risk.