Re: How does one make program launchers?

[Michael Welsh Duggan <md5i md5i com>]

Adam  Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>
writes:

> On Wed, 2011-12-07 at 20:40 -0500, Michael Welsh Duggan wrote:
>> So, apologies in advance for the stupid question.  I'm still trying to
>> figure out how Gnome 3 ticks.
>> When running Gnome 2, I was able to make a program launcher that I could
>> add to the status bar in order to click on it.  Gnome 3 has "favorites"
>> in the dash.  How do I, as a user, make it so that there is something in
>> the dash that I can click on to run 'emacsclient -a "" -c -n'?
>
> You can create .desktop files using "alacarte"; that will create a file
> in ~/.local/share/applications/.  Those files are seen by shell.
>
> Or you can make them by hand.  See an example at
> <http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/2011/12/tortoisehg-packages.html>.
> These files must follow the specification found at
> <http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/>

I'd like to thank you and Matt Novenstern (who replied via personal
email).  The solution involved the following:

1) Creating a desktop file with the following line:
   Exec=emacsclient -a "" -c -n %f
2) Naming that file emacs.desktop
3) Putting it in the ~/.local/share/applications directory.

Step 2 is necessary so that the Gnome shell will correlate the WM_CLASS
property with the desktop file.

-- 
Michael Welsh Duggan
(md5i md5i com)