GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 712279
Story: Gnome needs a graphical way of creating App Launchers, and Nautilus is probably the best candidate for this functionality.
Last modified: 2014-01-04 12:10:06 UTC
Alacarte is now really buggy, and is clumsy compared to Nautilus anyway. Nautilus on the other hand already offers a really nice view of the '.desktop' files in /usr/share/applications, and only needs a couple of additions to make it a workable GUI for creating launchers: 1. It should be possible to edit the name of the launcher in the properties dialog -- all other properties are editable except for this one. 2. It should be possible to see the name of the underlying '.desktop' file for which you are editing properties. With these two changes, a user can create a new app launcher by duplicating an existing one, and then editing the properties of the new one, where they can confirm they are definitely editing the new one by confirming the name of the '.desktop' file. For bonus points, it would be really nice if there was a 'Show Meta Information' option that could be unticked (in the same way that there is a 'Show Hidden Files' option) so that we could see the raw file-names, rename them if we wanted to, and edit them in GEdit, etc. For even more bonus points, if the 'Nautilus should have a superuser mode' bug (<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/12154>) was fixed, then we could do all of this without having to open Nautilus as root first.
Thanks for the idea, and I'm sorry for the late reply. What you describe as "Show Meta Information" option is proposed in bug 688632 as the new default. If we ignore launchers in the Desktop folder (which is on its way out), showing the raw file name and being able to open in text editor is what makes most sense. > then we could do all of this without having to open Nautilus as root first. This is tracked on bug 490200. Please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 688632 ***