How can I change the character limit of the search entry in the WhiskerMenu?

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and like to put my searches directly into the Search entry in my Whisker Menu on Xfce4, but there's a limit of using only 14 characters in the search.

Is there a workaround or a configuration for this?

Answer 1

There's a commit to the source code dating to 2015-12-27 whose description reads:

Fix limited input length for search actions. (bug #12381)

I suppose the bug was solved by this commit, so you just need to update to a newer version to get rid of it, see here for the versions provided by the different Ubuntu releases. You can try to install a newer version of xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin directly, however this may throw errors or don't work like expected – the best solution would be to just update your whole system to (at least) the current LTS 16.04.

Edit

It turns out Ubuntu 16.04 has v1.5.1 of xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin, but the bug was fixed only in v1.5.2. I see two (practicable) alternatives for you:

1. Update your whole system to 16.10 and then 17.04
2. Try to update the package manually.

Even though I normally highly recommend staying with the package sources, in this particular case I advise you to update just the package to v1.5.2. You could also try the up-to-date version, but keeping the changes little makes it more likely to not throw errors.

tl;dr: Download v1.5.2.tar.gz and install it following these instructions, but do not use sudo make install, but sudo checkinstall instead. You might have to install checkinstall first using sudo apt install checkinstall.