This tutorial will help you creating desktop shortcuts with icons on GNOME desktop environment in general and Ubuntu 24.04 computer system in particular. We divide this tutorial into three sections, first is to create basic shortcut on desktop, second is to create a custom shortcut for a custom program or command line or shell script and third is to edit existing applications menu to suit your needs. This works for other systems as well for example Debian, Fedora and Guix. Now, let us start practicing!
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Requirements
1. Applications installed in normal method.
2. File manager.
3. Doing copy and paste to certain files.
How To Create Shortcuts
1. Open your Home folder.
2. Go to /use/share/applications.
3. Find an application you want to make shortcut for. Take example, LibreOffice Writer.
4. Copy the file named libreoffice-writer.desktop.
5. Go to Desktop folder -> Paste.
6. Minimize all windows -> right-click libreoffice-writer.desktop -> Allow Launching.
The red circle will be removed and the logo will turn original.
7. Application shortcut is ready to use. Done.
8. Repeat step number 2 to 7 to create other application shortcuts. See example below.
How To Create Custom Shortcut
If you want to create a desktop shortcut for a particular command line or a shell script, you can simply copy and modify an existing shortcut file like the following.
For example, if we want to make a shortcut for program file FreeTube.AppImage located at /home/master with select icon a pink heart:
1. Go to Desktop directory.
2. Open libreoffice-writer.desktop with Text Editor.
3. Save as -> name it my-program.desktop -> save.
4. Remove the content and fill in like the following:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Icon=emblem-favorite
Type=Application
Categories=Multimedia
Name=My Custom Program (Change Me!)
Comment=My description to my custom program (Change Me!)
Exec=/home/master/FreeTube.AppImage --no-sandbox
5. Save.
6. Do "Allow Launching" like explained above. Done.
7. Repeat step 1-6 to make any other custom shortcuts. See picture below.
The application FreeTube is running from the shortcut on top-right corner.
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How To Edit Applications Menu Shortcut
For example, we want to rename LibreOffice to generic names. This is just an example as you can also edit many other things as well.
1. Run the application Alacarte*.
2. Select an application from a category. For example, LibreOffice Writer.
3. Modify.
4. Delete the name and write instead "Word Processor". Don't change anything else.
5. OK.
6. Repeat step 1-5 for Calc to be "Spreadsheet", Impress to be "Presentation". This example should be enough for you to explore your own creativity limitlessly.
Before:
After:
Notes:
With Alacarte, you can edit:
- Icon of the program.
- Name of the program.
- Description of the program.
- Path of the program file.
- Command line arguments of the program.
*) You should install it first and it appears on applications menu as "Main Menu".
We hope this helps you a lot in your daily computing with Ubuntu.
This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.