How to Manually Create Application Launcher in Ubuntu 12.04 (Unity)

Through the years, Ubuntu has got new features and a totally new and different environment which is Unity. Before, when Ubuntu had a classic gnome user interface, it was quite easy to create application launchers. But this doesn’t mean that it is so hard to do in Unity. Just keep reading and I’ll show you how to do that in a very easy way.

Unfortunatly, we can’t just right click on the Unity dash and create a launcher; furthermore, there is no application that manages the dash installed by default with Ubuntu. So we need to forget all these methods.

Suppose I want to create a laucher for Aptana.

I need to create a file in /usr/share/applications that contains informations about my application. I’ll use gedit to do that:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/Aptana.desktop

In this file, I need to past some informations about my application which are:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=3
Type=Application
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true
Icon=/opt/Aptana_Studio_3/icon.xpm
Name=Aptana
Comment=Programming IDE
Exec=/opt/Aptana_Studio_3/AptanaStudio3
Categories=Application;Development;

Don’t forget to change informations that consern you application. (Probably, you’ll need to change: Icon, Name, Comment, Exec and Categories)

That’s it! Now I need to save my file and check my Unity dash