Create New App Launcher in Gnome Shell 3.8

Fixing another GNOME gnuisance…

This used to be something that was super-easy using the alacarte menu editor, but unfortunately in their quest for ultimate simplicity, the GNOME designers also like to strip out genuinely useful functionality.

Trying to get a new application to show up in the gnome-shell Activities view is something of a mystery, but menulibre aims to make this process much easier. Install it in Ubuntu 13.04 as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:menulibre-dev/devel
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install menulibre

The program itself seems to be pretty easy to use, and brings back the alacarte functionality, while adding a number of additional features. Note, you can also run the following command to do create a basic launcher (without quotes), but I prefer the customization that menulibre makes so easy:

gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new "path to .desktop file you want to create"