How to create custom launcher in gnome desktop

Q&A
1

Hi,

Just couple weeks ago I have used the command “gnome-desktop-item-edit” in order to create my custom launcher and icon. Now that command has disappeared. How can I do this task now?

Thanks,
Oleg

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2

Check this
https://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/

You can find system-wide desktop files in this directory
/usr/share/applications

Your per-user desktop files should be placed in this directory
$HOME/.local/share/applications

After adding a desktop file, you will need to run
update-desktop-database

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3

@mesiment any idea why this command is now missing?

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4

@mesiment any idea why this command is now missing?

Yes, in summary, this was removed by upstream (gnome-panel@758b548a). Once we moved to gnome-panel-3.32.0, we picked the previously mentioned commit which removes this tool.

NEWS file for gnome-panel-3.32.0 states the following:

Version 3.32.0
==============
- Fix some compiler warnings.
- Fix some deprecation warnings.
- Turn old main menu object into applet.
- Turn old menu button object into applet.
- Remove gnome-desktop-item-edit application.
- Updated translations:
  Alan Mortensen (da), Anders Jonsson (sv), Balázs Úr (hu),
  Daniel Mustieles (es), Marek Cernocky (cs), Марко М. Костић (sr),
  Matej Urbančič (sl), Nathan Follens (nl), Kukuh Syafaat (id),
  Mario Blättermann (de), Piotr Drąg (pl), Rafael Fontenelle (pt_BR),
  Stas Solovey (ru).
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5

Thank you, all, for quick responces

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6

I’m trying to customize my gnome desktop a little… or at least start seeing what I can tweak. What are the ways to accomplish this? And if the answer is “use gnome desktop database”, then where can I look for help?

Thanks,
Chris

7

What do you mean by customising your gnome desktop?

Are you trying to change the appearance? You may check the extensions for gnome.

8

Yes, appearance, as well as locations of things. Would be awesome to have a power button at bottom left – I’m hoping to get some office folks running Clear Linux at work instead of Win10. Having to use down arrow at far right isn’t obvious enough :slight_smile:

I’ve been playing with various gnome packages in “software” but many have no effect and others are confusing. It’s like the myriad of gnome softwares need a wrapper outlining what they do. Took me an hour to find “Dash to Panel” just to get the top bar on the bottom.

9

I’m a new user and I just switched from elementaryOS to Clear Linux desktop. Please be patient!

I’m at the same point as mentioned above and try to create a custom app starter, but I do not see a solution in this post! The described way does not work! Here is mentioned that the main menu now is an applet, but how do I create a custom app starter?

In https://developer.gnome.org/integration-guide/stable/desktop-files.html.en is described how it should work, but under Clear Linux it does not!

10

I solved my issue! The contents of the desktop-file is important! I checked mine with desktop-file-validate and got a message that everything is fine. It contained …

Icon=/home/xxxxx/Tools/VSCode/resources/app/resources/linux/code.png

After …

  • changing the above line to
Icon=vscode
  • copying the png to /home/xxxxx/.local/share/icons/hicolor/512x512/apps/vscode.png
  • resizing it to 512 pixel
  • and calling update-desktop-database ~/.loacl/share/applications

everything has been fine! :wink:

11

The same thing happened to me with Visual Studio Code, but it was solved when I ran it from the terminal with:

flatpak run com.visualstudio.code

Then I could look for it inside the app drawer, or from the launcher (I added it as a favorite)

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