Ubuntu – Intellij IDEA launching another icon at start

desktopintellij

It's hard to explain this without a picture, so I'll add one. Basically, I installed IntelliJ IDEA using this PPA on 16.04. After installting, I found that typing "idea" in the standard program seach was turning up nothing, though the command intellij-idea-community was launching the program correctly.

So I created a .desktop file at /usr/share/applications/intellij_idea.desktop with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=IntelliJ IDEA
Type=Application
Exec=/opt/intellij-idea-community/bin/idea.sh
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/intellij-idea-community/bin/idea.png
Comment=Integrated Development Environment
NoDisplay=false
Categories=Development;IDE;
Name[en]=IntelliJ IDEA
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.22

And now, IDEA start showing up in search. So far so good.

I have an annoyance, though. Once IDEA starts up, the icon gets replaced by the ugly default question-mark thing (see the last icon in Unity):

enter image description here

Everything works fine. It's just that this icon is an eyesore. Also, if I lock this icon to launcher and then close IDEA and click on the icon to start the IDE, it doesn't. Instead, I just see a "busy" animation of this icon. To launch, I again have to type "idea" in the search and click on the png icon.

Any explanations for this?

Best Answer

What happened

intellij-idea-community installs a perfectly working .desktop file: /usr/share/applications/intellij-idea-community.desktop. Sometimes however, a freshly installed application needs a log out/in to show up in Dash.

This is apparently the case in your situation. I tried installing it with the same result. Simply log out/in did the job:

enter image description here

Your home-made launcher does start up the application, but does not connect to the window, so a generic icon shows up to represent the window.

How to fix

Remove your own made launcher from /usr/share/applications/intellij_idea.desktop, log out and back in.

important note

In any way, since you tried lock the (incorrect?) icon to the launcher, make sure to remove any Intellij IDEA - related .desktop file from ~/.local/share/applications, since possibly remaining .desktop files will overrule the global one.

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