40 Feature request: add option "Open file location" to application dashboard launchers

Hi, sometimes you need to open an applications desktop file and edit something in it.
and it’s hard to find the launcher when the “application name” and the “.desktop file name” are different.
this is an example:

desktop entry: image
the desktop file name: /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop

Honestly, I think you will find that’s something the majority of users never, ever need to do. In fact, in your provided example they couldn’t, since files in /usr/share/ are protected, require root permissions to edit, and generally shouldn’t be edited since they’re owned by the OS package management.

The location of the .desktop file for an application isn’t generally a user-consumption thing, and most users would have no idea what to do with it if they had it. Heck, .desktop file support was even removed from Nautilus (sorry, org.gnome.Nautilus… sorry, Files) a while back. With the current push towards minimalism in the GNOME UI, I can’t see that sort of link being added solely for the 0.1% of users who might ever need it. Not in the default interface, anyway.

It might be possible to write an extension that adds such a thing, though I’m not really sure all of the hooks are there to do it.

What you’d really want to do, if you’re modifying .desktop files, is have a tool that automatically looks up the file in /usr/share/applications/, copies it to $HOME/.local/share/applications/, and then opens that copy for editing. That’s the correct way to customize .desktop files, when necessary.

2 Likes

Yes, and it could (and should) be a separate Launcher Tinkerer application, not a built-in feature of the compositor.

So essentially MenuLibre or Alacarte

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