Desktop Entry Editor

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.

1. Install
2. Basic Use
3. Bug Reports

Install

Requirements

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.

• GTK+ 3 (Fedora gtk3, Ubuntu libgtk-3-0)
• PyGObject 3 (Fedora pygobject3, Ubuntu python-gobject)
• GtkSourceView 3 (Fedora gtksourceview3, Ubuntu libgtksourceview-3.0)
• PyXDG (Fedora pyxdg, Ubuntu python-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, Ubuntu libglib2.0-dev)
• Autotools (automake, autoconf, intltool, m4, gettext)

Build a Release Version

Download the latest release from the Downloads Page and then run:

tar -xzf desktop-entry-editor-x.x.x.tar.gz
cd desktop-entry-editor-x.x.x
./configure
make

Note: replace x.x.x with the version number from the file you downloaded.

Become root user (su or sudo) and then run:

make install

Build the Development Version

git clone https://github.com/Quixotix/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

Basic Use

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.

Bug Reports

Report bugs on the GitHub Issues Page.