Using Kupfer on MATE

I am trying out MATE desktop and really liking it.

I like to use a (GNOME-Do style) keyboard-driven application launcher, and have found Kupfer really good.

Kupfer as packaged for Ubuntu MATE does not support MATE desktop, so the file manager ("Caja") does not show up by default, along with other things like the preferences dialogs, and there is no support for actions like Log Out or Shut Down.

To get MATE applications to show up in Kupfer, all I had to do was make up a config value that is not presented in the preferences, by editing the config file:

pluma ~/.config/kupfer/kupfer.cfg

I found the line that started "desktop_type = " and changed it to say:

desktop_type = MATE

Update [Thanks to Kristian Nygaard Jensen and Igor Santos]: if you can't find that line in the file, add this at the bottom of the file:

[plugin_applications]
desktop_type = MATE

To get MATE session commands in Kupfer, I copied the GNOME session management plugin and made a similar one for MATE.

cd /usr/share/kupfer/kupfer/plugin
sudo cp session_gnome.py session_mate.py
sudo pluma session_mate.py

I just changed the 3 lines after "# sequences of argument lists", and made them look like this:

LOGOUT_CMD = (["mate-session-save", "--logout-dialog"],)
SHUTDOWN_CMD = (["mate-session-save", "--shutdown-dialog"],)
LOCKSCREEN_CMD = (["mate-screensaver-command", "--lock"],)

When I restarted Kupfer I was able to open MATE applications and control the MATE session using Kupfer.

There is an open pull request from 2013 for Kupfer to add MATE session management: github.com/engla/kupfer/pull/15 - thanks to its author labero, since this showed me what I needed to do for that part.