Idea and clumsy workaround for putting available software directly in mint menu.

[ctlively]

Reddit Thread

Thread:

I don't know if this is a support request so much as a feature request. I would like to be able to search available software as well as the local search. Like gsettings set org.cinnamon enabled-search-providers ["duckduckgo@linuxmint.com"] allows for entered text to be searched via duckduckgo.

I looked, but not very hard, and I couldn't find a solution.

Thanks!!

Edit: Overwhelmingly friendly crew here, thanks for helping. This was actually really fun; poking around the minterverse and seeing a little of the inner workings is fun for me. maybe I'm weird.

I was able to put together a little workaround:

asked ai to help me out; turns out mintinstall (really missed an opportunity for naming it minstall) won't take an argument to search when called, but gnome-software will! so as long as you don't mind using another software manager, this is indeed possible. I honestly couldn't tell the difference, so it was fine for me. I also checked to see if this was a bad idea, and it seemed like using another manager, even alongside the original, is perfectly fine.

cat > ~/.local/share/cinnamon/search_providers/packages@linuxmint.com/search_provider.js << 'EOF'

const Mainloop = imports.mainloop;

const Gio = imports.gi.Gio;

const St = [imports.gi.St](http://imports.gi.st/);

const Util = imports.misc.util;

function perform_search(pattern){

push_results(pattern);

}

function push_results(results){

var file = Gio.file_new_for_path('/home/myname/.local/share/cinnamon/search_providers/packages@linuxmint.com/icon.png');

var gicon = new Gio.FileIcon({ file: file });

var myicon = new St.Icon({gicon: gicon, icon_size: 22, icon_type: St.IconType.FULLCOLOR, reactive: true, track_hover: true});

var results_array = new Array();

results_array.push({

id: results,

label: _("Search Software Manager for '" + results + "'"),

icon: myicon

});

send_results(results_array);

}

function on_result_selected(result){

Util.spawn(['gnome-software', '--search=' + result.id]);

}

EOF

then run:

gsettings set org.cinnamon enabled-search-providers "['duckduckgo@linuxmint.com', 'packages@linuxmint.com']"

restart cinnamon and there you go!