Adding a local application to the favourites favorites menu

Desktop
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I have firefox installed manually in /usr/local/firefox . I wanted to add this to the favourites menu in Gnome Classic. To do this I ended up adding an entry in /usr/share/applications i.e. firefox-local.desktop . This then appeared on the applications menu, but still I could not see a way to add it to favourites, except by logging out, and then logging in as Gnome not Gnome Classic. I then select activities, then click the applications icon, then search for firefox local, and select add to favourites. Then log out and log in again as Gnome Classic. I see in the application ‘Tweaks’ that there is an option to add the activities menu to the top bar, but this doesn’t work on Gnome Classic. What am I missing? There must be an easier way to add an application to the favourites menu, especially if it is already running.

I may have complicated matters by disabling the tracker service and I can’t remember how to enable it. Perhaps this updates menus?

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So there are two things:

  • Creating the *.desktop file for the local application (that you already solved).
  • Adding an app to the favorites with the GNOME Classic session.

For the second item I didn’t try myself, but I know that the favorites are saved with GSettings (dconf). This can be seen with a dconf watch command:

$ dconf watch /
/org/gnome/shell/favorite-apps
  ['maximized-terminal.desktop', 'org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop']

So Tracker is normally not used for this feature. The favorite *.desktop files are read with GSettings.

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