Configuring a shortcut for LightDM's app launcher

We do it, then we forget

That’s it! I’ve got a new shiny tool that I want to use for my day to day work. It’s so pretty, it has nice features that’ll help me a lot… But it is not packaged / has a custom installer that’ll create launcher shortcuts /o\ ! (I kinda like to just have to type

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<META>+"my app name"+<ENTER>

It’s all about configuration files, really

One of the ways to make this work is in the

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~/.local/share/applications

-rw-rw-r-- 1 hoshin  346 april  4  14:56 defaults.list
-rw------- 1 hoshin  259 march  12 12:00 jetbrains-webstorm.desktop
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hoshin 1,7K may    24 10:00 mimeinfo.cache
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hoshin  272 april  5  10:43 wine-extension-application.desktop
[...]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hoshin  258 april  5  10:47 wine-extension-xsl.desktop

and a typical

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.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=WebStorm
Icon=/home/hoshin/Webstorm/bin/webstorm.svg
Exec="/home/hoshin/Webstorm/bin/webstorm.sh" %f
Comment=Develop with pleasure!
Categories=Development;IDE;
Terminal=false
StartupWMClass=jetbrains-webstorm

This one was actually created automatically when installing webstorm 2016, but the point is that we can basically take that file, copy it, and then edit the name / path / icon / whatever values, and we should almost be good to go (it seens to take a logout / login to get LightDM to reload the configuration)