Desktop Entry Editor is a GUI application for editing and creating application launchers for GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and any other desktop environment implementing the [Desktop Entry Specification] 1 from freedesktop.org.
The following packages are needed to run Desktop Entry Editor. Most newer Linux distributions will already have these packages installed or available in their software repositories.
- Glib 3 (Fedora
glib2
, Ubuntulibglib2.0
) - GTK+ 3 (Fedora
gtk3
, Ubuntulibgtk-3-0
) - PyGObject 3 (Fedora
pygobject3
, Ubuntupython-gobject
) - GtkSourceView 3 (Fedora
gtksourceview3
, Ubuntulibgtksourceview-3.0
) - PyXDG (Fedora
pyxdg
, Ubuntupython-xdg
)
If you are going to be building Desktop entry Editor from source you may need these additional packages:
- GLib development headers (Fedora
glib2-devel
, Ubuntulibglib2.0-dev
) - Autotools (
automake
,autoconf
,intltool
,libtool
,m4
,gettext
)
git clone https://github.com/MicahCarrick/desktop-entry-editor.git
cd desktop-entry-editor
aclocal -I m4
intltoolize
autoconf
automake --add-missing
./configure
make
Become root user (su
or sudo
) and then run:
make install
The left-hand side of the Desktop Entry Editor interface contains a list
application launchers found on your system in XDG_DATA_DIRS. By default you
will only see application launchers for which you have write permissions. To
see all application launchers, you can select View > Show read-only-files
.
Selecting an application launcher in the list will open it in the editing area.
As a regular user, the ideal place to save your application launchers is in
~/.local/share/applications
which is the default location used by Desktop
Entry Editor.
The 'Basic' tab allows you to edit basic information that most people want to
use when creating an application launcher. The 'Advanced' tab allows you to
edit any of the recognized Desktop Entry keys. As the 'Advanced' tab
allows free-form typing, you should validate your changes by selecting
Tools > Validate
before you save.
To get your application launcher to appear in the system menu, overview, or search, you can try running the following command as root:
update-desktop-database
That will not work for all desktop environments and you may need to log out and then log back in before your application launcher is available.
Report bugs on the GitHub Issues Page.