Ubuntu – How to create a custom application launcher in Gnome Shell

desktopgnome-shell

How do you create a custom application launcher in Gnome Shell?

I have a local Eclipse installation that I'd like to be to quickly launch. So I created a symlink to the eclipse binary and placed it on my desktop. If I open a terminal, cd to ~/Desktop and run ./eclipse it starts Eclipse perfectly. However, if I click the Eclipse icon on my desktop, and choose run, nothing happens.

Alternatively, I wouldn't mind being able to search for Eclipse on the "Activities" screen, but I can't find any documentation on adding or registering custom applications.

Best Answer

Try to create a eclipse.desktop file under /usr/share/applications (or ~/.local/share/applications or directly in ~/Desktop) with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Eclipse IDE
Exec=/path/to/eclipse/executable
Icon=/path/to/eclipse/icon
Type=Application
Categories=Development;

You can choose another category, too. For additional information:

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Adding custom applications to GNOME launcher

You can use Main Menu for this. If not, install it first:

sudo apt-get install alacarte

1. Open Main Menu

2. See the example

Main Menu

After that you can call your applications with name: "command_of_application".

Edit: I missed that you had asked for applications in your home directory. If so, command must be the full path of that application.

Ubuntu – Adding the launcher to the Unity Launcher automatically. How

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.