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Santosh Kumar
Asked: 2012-09-27 16:15:55 +0800 CST

Why is Vim not launching when passing arguments in its .desktop file?

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I have vim.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/ directory with these lines:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Vim Text Editor
Comment=Edit text files
TryExec=vim
Exec=vim
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Icon=terminal
Categories=Utility;TextEditor;
StartupNotify=true
MimeType=text/plain;

This .desktop file works fine at this point (i.e. I can search in Unity dashboard it and click it to open vim)

But I wanted more from this desktop file. I wanted to start it in insert mode, so I changed some parts of it, like:

TryExec=vim -c 'startinsert'
Exec=vim -c 'startinsert'

But as soon as I save this file I am not able to search it.

unity

1 Answers

  1. Try logging out/in or even restarting to fix this. The following .desktop file works perfectly for me:

    [Desktop Entry]
Name=Vim Text Editor
Comment=Edit text files
Exec=vim -c 'startinsert'
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Icon=terminal
Categories=Utility;TextEditor;
StartupNotify=true
MimeType=text/plain;

                                enter image description here

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