Libmenu-cache is a library creating and utilizing caches to speed up the manipulation for freedesktop.org defined application menus. It can be used as a replacement of libgnome-menu of gnome-menus. Advantages: 1. Shorten time for loading menu entries. 2. Ease of use. (API is very similar to that of libgnome-menu) 3. Lightweight runtime library. (Parsing of the menu definition files are done by menu-cache-gen when the menus are really changed.) 4. Less unnecessary and complicated file monitoring. 5. Heavily reduced disk I/O. Spec: Cached menus are localized and stored in ~/.cache/menus/file_name. file_name is a md5 hash of the name of the original menu + some environment variable + locale name. Since most data in a menu are plain text (names, description comments, icon names,...etc.), the cached file is in plain text rather than binary to prevent byte order problems. Format of the cached menu file, line by line. (Spaces before the lines are for easier demostration of hierarchy. There are no spaces in the real cached file.): version number (major.minor) menu name> number of files to monitor list of files/dirs which require monitor (prefix D or F indicate whether it is a dir or file) list of DE names used in this menu other than the known DEs (LXDE, GNOME, XFCE, KDE, ROX), seperated by ; +id of top menu dir (+ means dir entry, and - means an application entry) title comment icon name menu directory file basename dir in which menu directory file locates (use this number as index to get the string from array of preceding list of monitored files) -application desktop id (NOTE: desktop id is not necessarily the basename of desktop file) title comment icon name app desktop file basename, empty means the same as desktop id. dir in which the desktop file localtes (use this number as index to get the string from array of preceding list of monitored files) generic name exec command line bitmask flags: (use terminal)|(use startup notification) show_in_flags: bitwise or of masks for various DEs. +sub dir id title comment icon name ...