Ubuntu – Force Unity to open any file with any program

Have a look at the answer to How to add my favorite places as a quicklist in my home's icon in Unity?

You can change the first Exec line to read Exec=nautilus Documents and it will open your Documents folder.

I actually made a script for that. It places the icon down in the launcher, but with a minor change, you can put it at the top (or any other position) as well.

As it is, it is in python2, but simply change the shebang to #!/usr/bin/env python3 if you'd like to use it as python3. The code is identical.

To use it, the .desktop file needs to be in either /usr/share/applications or in ~/.local/share/applications, but usually that is the case.

How to use

• copy the script below, save it as launcher_add.py
• make it executable

Run it by the command:

/path/to/launcher_add.py name_of_desktopfile.desktop 

you have to use the filename of the .desktop file, without the path.

The script

#!/usr/bin/env python

import subprocess
import sys

desktopfile = sys.argv[1]

def current_launcher():
    get_current = subprocess.check_output(["gsettings", "get", "com.canonical.Unity.Launcher", "favorites"]).decode("utf-8")
    return eval(get_current)

def add_new(desktopfile):
    curr_launcher = current_launcher()
    last = [i for i, x in enumerate(curr_launcher) if x.startswith("application://")][-1]
    new_icon = "application://"+desktopfile
    if not new_icon in curr_launcher:
        curr_launcher.insert(last, new_icon)
        subprocess.Popen(["gsettings", "set", "com.canonical.Unity.Launcher","favorites",str(curr_launcher)])
    else:
        pass

add_new(desktopfile)

The script prevents multiple occasions in the launcher list of the same application, which would cause corruption of he list.