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flawr
Asked: 2019-03-28 02:09:51 +0800 CST

GUI for editing "Open with" menu

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When you manually install programs and you want to add them to the "Open With" list in the context menu, you usually have to create edit multiple .desktop files I think is rather cumbersome as there are a lot of ways to make mistakes. Is there a a program with a GUI to do that for you? (Or maybe even a native way?)

I have found alacarte but that only makes your programs available for adding to the launcher.

nautilus .desktop gnome-shell 18.10

1 Answers

  1. You can do the "hard" part (viz. creating a .desktop launcher in ~/.local/share/applications/) using the GUI tool alacarte and then make a slight modification to the .desktop file manually.

    Note that a .desktop launcher created with alcarte is found in ~/.local/share/applications/ and usually with a name of the form alacarte-made*.desktop. You need to open such a file with a text editor and check/modify a couple of things:

    1. There should be a NoDisplay=true line. This hides the application from your applications menu. So add (or modify) a NoDisplay=true line.

    2. Make sure there is a proper field code (%f / %F / %u / %U) at the end of your Exec= line. This means the line should look like 

      Exec=/path/to/the/program %f

      or something similar, not simply 

      Exec=/path/to/the/program
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