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fabio_hirono
Asked: 2018-12-19 10:23:41 +0800 CST

Adding an icon for Spyder in Favourites bar in Ubuntu 18.04

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I have freshly installed Ubuntu 18.04 and Anaconda (with Python 3.7) in my laptop, and I want to set up a launcher icon for the Spyder IDE in the Favourites bar - something I've done many times in the past couple of years when running Ubuntu 16.

I can successfully launch Spyder from the Terminal and it seems to be working fine, but when I run it from the terminal and right-click the icon, it does not give me an option for adding it to Favorites.

[Strangely, searching for an application named "spyder" returns no results; not sure if this might be related, but...]

I understand I can manually add an icon for it by creating a .desktop file, as described here and here, and adding it to /usr/share/applications, as described here. For example, I have tried using the following spyder.desktop file (available in the Spyder Github):

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=Spyder
GenericName=Spyder
Comment=The Scientific Python Development Environment
Icon=spyder
TryExec=spyder
Exec=spyder %F
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/x-python;
Categories=Development;Science;IDE;Qt;
Keywords=Development;Science;IDE;Qt;
StartupNotify=true
X-AppStream-Ignore=True
StartupWMClass=Spyder

However, even after creating this file, Spyder still does not show up in Applications. And if I try to run this file, I get a fairly generic

"There was an error launching the application"

message.

Is this a known issue with Spyder and/or Ubuntu 18? Am I missing something here? Any help would be much appreciated! Many thanks!

icons .desktop gnome-shell ubuntu-dock spyder

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    As the error message "There was an error launching the application" suggests, there is some sort of error in spyder.desktop. Fields like Exec and TryExec require the absolute path of the executable file, therefore the values for Exec and TryExec must be /home/hirono/anaconda3/bin/spyder. Same goes for Icon. It seems like you haven't given even the extension for the icon image. Value must be like /home/hirono/path-to-icon/icon.png.

    Also, double check the permissions of spyder.desktop and /home/hirono/anaconda3/bin/spyder. They both must be executable.

    • 7

  2. The suggestion by Kulfy worked for me. Just as a note for others who are having this issue, I was skeptical that adding the absolute path was the fix I needed since calling spyder from the terminal worked fine and calling

    spyder.desktop->

    [Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=Spyder
GenericName=Spyder
Comment=The Scientific Python Development Environment
Icon=spyder
TryExec=spyder
Exec=spyder %F
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/x-python;
Categories=Development;Science;IDE;Qt;
Keywords=Development;Science;IDE;Qt;
StartupNotify=true
X-AppStream-Ignore=True
StartupWMClass=Spyder

    as

    gtk-launch spyder.desktop

    would also launch spyder correctly. I don't know why it matters, but definitely use the abs path for applications not installed via terminal apt-get that have this issue.

    after making changes to the <application>.desktop file alt-F2->r->enter to reload profile instead of logging out/ back in.

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