Custom Application not showing in launcher

[Muizzyranking]

For the sake of my dotfiles, I make applications in a different that I can symlink without polluting the standard path. I am able to launch the application with gtk-launch but the entry does not exist in the launcher at all. How do I solve this?

[TheMysteriousGhost]

The launcher gets its app list from Quickshell's DesktopEntries, which only looks in the standard XDG applications dirs: $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications (~/.local/share/applications) plus <dir>/applications for every dir in $XDG_DATA_DIRS.

gtk-launch working is a bit misleading here. If you exported XDG_DATA_DIRS in your shell rc, your terminal sees it, but DMS was started by the compositor/session and never got that variable. Two clean ways to fix it:

1. Add your dir to the session environment (keeps your dotfiles layout as-is). Note the dir you add is the parent of an applications/ folder:

# ~/.config/environment.d/50-dotfiles-apps.conf
XDG_DATA_DIRS=$HOME/dotfiles/share:${XDG_DATA_DIRS:-/usr/local/share:/usr/share}

with your entries in ~/dotfiles/share/applications/*.desktop. Make sure you keep the existing value at the end, otherwise all your system apps disappear from the launcher. If you're on niri/Hyprland, setting it in the compositor's environment / env = block works too. Then log out and back in (or at least restart DMS from a session that has the variable).

2. Or just symlink the .desktop files into ~/.local/share/applications/. Nothing gets "polluted" since the real files still live in your dotfiles, and no env changes are needed.

Also double-check the entry itself: NoDisplay=true or Hidden=true hides it from launchers even though gtk-launch will still run it, and desktop-file-validate yourapp.desktop catches typos that make it get skipped.

[Muizzyranking]

This was very helpful, thank you very much. I've been able to solve it by adding my custom path in hyprland config.

I like to be able to create a new desktop entry and it automatically gets added instead of symlinking after create new file and it just makes my link script follow the same pattern as other configs.

Thank you very much once again.

[TheMysteriousGhost]

Nice, glad it worked! Setting it in the Hyprland config is a clean way to do it. New entries in that folder should show up without any extra linking.