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Accepted
Vitor Mazuco
Asked: 2013-10-16 09:23:17 +0800 CST

Create a shortcut for URL?

  • 772

How can I create a shortcut for URL in my desktop? I want to use them in Firefox or Chrome.

If a copy and paste didn't work.

What script I have to use?

shortcuts

12 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In Ubuntu an URL shortcut is stored in a .desktop file as follow (for example):

    [Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Link to Ask Ubuntu
Type=Link
URL=http://www.askubuntu.com/
Icon=text-html

    You can drag links from Firefox or Chrome and drop them on the Desktop or any other folder where you have permissions to save files.

    Note: Link will appear on your Desktop or your file explorer (i.e. caja) under the name in the line Name=…, not by its actual filename. And without any ….desktop extension.

    • 62

  2. This solution is multi-platform also:

    1. Create a new simple text file with an .html extension and whatever name you want.

    2. Edit the file with the program you want and add this content:

      <html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://askubuntu.com" />
    </head>
    <body> </body>
</html>

    3. Save the file.

    • 18

  3. I needed something like this, but Gnome (now?) requires *.desktop files to be in specific locations, so using those directly wouldn't solve my problem, as I wanted web-links for reference mostly in project folders. And they wouldn't be cross-platform compatible either.

    Eventually I turned to Microsoft's .url files, which are easily constructed and look like this:

    [InternetShortcut]
URL=https://askubuntu.com

    (I read that the trailing line break is important, and probably should be \r\n for Windows compatibility)

    And created a .desktop specification to handle them:

    [Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=URL Handler
MimeType=application/x-mswinurl;
Exec=bash -c "set -e; P=$(python3 -c 'import configparser,sys,urllib.parse; c=configparser.ConfigParser(); c.read(sys.argv[1])\ntry:\n    u=c[\"InternetShortcut\"][\"URL\"]\n    if not urllib.parse.urlparse(u).scheme in [\"http\",\"https\",\"ftp\",\"ssh\"]: raise Exception(\"Invalid scheme in URI\")\n    print(u)\nexcept Exception as e: print(e,file=sys.stderr); exit(3);' %f); xdg-open \"$P\""

    Put that into a file in ~/.local/share/applications/<whatever>.desktop. In my case Gnome immediately bound *.url files to them.

    This requires xdg-utils package (for xdg-open, it's likely there if you have a desktop-environment) and python 3.

    I really really didn't want to use python, but doing unchecked parsing on something like this didn't suit me. The largest parts of the python script are to avoid infinite loops among other dangers -- in case someone gets funny ideas and puts a file name in a .url file. It ensures that a scheme is present and is one of http(s), ftp, ssh. I guess that list can be easily extended, but I actually don't know which schemes Windows supports.

    • 9

  4. Add this to your ~/.bashrc:-

    function createUrlShortcut {
    if [ "$#" -ne 3 ]; then
        echo "Illegal number of parameters. Usage : createUrlShortcut Name Url FileBaseName"
    fi
    printf "[Desktop Entry]\nEncoding=UTF-8\nName=$1\nType=Link\nURL=$2\nIcon=text-html" > ~/Desktop/$3.Desktop
}

    To create a shortcut, do as follows:-

    createUrlShortcut RGB-Dataset https://vision.in.tum.de/data/datasets/rgbd-dataset/download RGBD-Dataset-Link

    The first argument is the name you want to be displayed in nautilus.
    The second argument is the url.
    The third argument is the actual name of the file which will be appended by .Desktop extension.

    Note that this will create a file with name RGBD-Dataset-Link.Desktop but will be displayed as RGB-Dataset in nautilus.

    • 7

  5. Try this. Install Gnome Panel, just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command(s) below:

    sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

    Once installed type this:

    gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ~/path/to/shortcut

    (location of shortcut). In the example below, I will create a shortcut for Ubuntu.com and place it inside the Documents folder. Once I hit Enter a window will open with the properties. See images below.

    gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ~/Documents

    enter image description here

    enter image description here

    Once done, just click on them newly created shortcut.

    • 6

  6. Additionally, like all solutions that involve a command line, one can do it with a the mouse in three steps in a Chromium like browser :

    1. Click on the menu (the three vertical dots on top right).
    2. Click on "more tools…"
    3. Click on "create application shortcut" to create a shortcut on your desktop
    4. (depending on your configuration) : You could need to right click on the shortcut and add execution permissions

    Afterward, one .desktop file shall be added to the desktop of the creator.

    • 4

  7. You can just copy the following into a text file and save it with a .desktop file extension in the desktop folder

    [Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=google-chrome http://google.com
Name=the name of the shortcut
Icon=/path/to/your/photo

    This works for me on Ubuntu 20.04. It uses the terminal for launching a URL. you can change google-chrome to firefox if you like that browser more.

    I tried different things but this was the one that helped me out.

    • 2

  8. Edit: using Type=Link is superior (see accepted answer).

    As some others suggested, a desktop file launching the browser with the url as an argument works really well. I would like to add that you can pass it to xdg-open (installed by default) instead of firefox or google-chrome, to open up the default browser instead of having the browser hardcoded into the file.

    Something like:

    [Desktop Entry]
Name=Shortcut name
Exec=xdg-open https://example.com/
Type=Application
Icon=applications-internet

    Don't forget to include the protocol (https:// in this case), or xdg-open will be looking for a directory instead.

    Then, make sure to right click the file on the desktop and select "Allow Launching" (Ubuntu 20.04) to turn it into a desktop icon.

    • 1

  9. Wow this was sticky! So many answers with such complexity, here is a clean solution -

    Solution

            QuickCut - Add a context menu to quickly save shortcut files (url, desktop, webloc)

    Procedure

    1. Navigate to Add-Ons Page
    2. Select '+ Add to Firefox'
    3. Select the QuickCut icon on upper right of toolbar to generate a link to the active page
    4. Navigate to Downloads/ to retrieve your new shortcut

    Done! ??

    • 0

  10. I had the same problem with creation shortcuts from chromium, and I found how to fix it for myself: for example -

    #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
Desktop Entry
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Type=Application 
Name=Free Rice App
Exec=/snap/chromium/1424/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome --profile- 
directory=Default --app-id=pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic
Icon=chrome-pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic-Default
StartupWMClass=crx_pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic

    I just add "chromium" to exec, and now it's work for me, and the final code looks like -

    #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=Free Rice App
Exec=chromium /snap/chromium/1424/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome --
profile-directory=Default --app-id=pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic
Icon=chrome-pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic-Default
StartupWMClass=crx_pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic
    • 0