lsdesktop

Two small utilities for working with XDG desktop entries.

lsdesktop lists visible .desktop files as name:path, with the most recently launched shown first.

desklaunch parses a single .desktop file and runs it, or prints the cleaned exec command with -p. Both update the shared history so lsdesktop knows what you launched last.

This is mostly tradcoded, but some parts were AI-assisted (mostly tests and regexes :)) and carefully reviewed. It is a learning project. (Ironically, this paragraph was partly LLM-generated.)

Installation

With Go:

go install github.com/FLchs/lsdesktop/cmd/...@latest

From source:

git clone https://github.com/FLchs/lsdesktop.git
cd lsdesktop
make
sudo make install

make install respects PREFIX (defaults to /usr/local) and puts man pages where they belong.

Usage

List applications:

lsdesktop

Launch one:

desklaunch /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop

Print the command without running it:

desklaunch -p /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop

For example, use with fzf for an interactive picker. lsdesktop pipes name:path pairs into fzf, which shows only the name (--with-nth={1}) and passes the path (--accept-nth=2) to desklaunch:

desklaunch $(lsdesktop | fzf --with-nth={1} --accept-nth=2 -d : --tiebreak=begin)

An example script is provided as fzf-launcher.sh in the repo root.

License

GPL v3. See LICENSE.