FAQ

Is this a fork of Whisker Menu? Will it stay in sync with upstream?

Yes, MeowMenu originated as a fork of Whisker Menu by Graeme Gott. No, it will not track upstream — MeowMenu is now a standalone project with its own settings schema (meowmenu.xml), feature roadmap, and release cycle. All 54 upstream translations are preserved.

Can I install MeowMenu alongside Whisker Menu?

Yes. They are separate XFCE panel plugins and can coexist. You can have both buttons on the panel simultaneously.

The plugin doesn’t appear in ‘Add New Items’ after install.

Run xfce4-panel -r to restart the panel. If it still doesn’t appear, verify the .so file installed correctly by running ls /usr/lib/xfce4/panel/plugins/libmeowmenu.so (or ls /usr/local/lib/xfce4/panel/plugins/libmeowmenu.so for source installs). If the file is absent, the package may not have installed cleanly. Try reinstalling.

My custom preset isn’t loading.

Check three things: (1) the file is in ~/.local/share/meowmenu/presets/; (2) the filename stem matches the Id field inside the file (e.g., my-preset.meowpreset must contain Id=my-preset); (3) you restarted the panel with xfce4-panel -r after placing the file.

Can I contribute a translation?

Yes — edit the relevant po/<lang>.po file in the repository, run msgfmt --check po/<lang>.po to validate it, and open a Pull Request against the development branch. Only Italian has been validated by a native speaker so far; all other languages were extended via LLM-assisted translation and are warmly awaiting review.