I am interested in reactions to this idea and if there is a better way to go about it.

I am very happy with this in my setup. It is particularly useful for launching steam games.

Mh, doesn't work on my end; a .desktop file that's only in ~/.local/share/applications but not in any of the other directories will fail to be found

Arg! How strange. I introduced some broken desktop files and logging locally to double check the behavior on my end and I cannot seem to reproduce the issue yet.

logging diffs:

modified   XMonad/Prompt/DotDesktop.hs@@ -54,6 +54,8 @@ getDirContents dir = do getDotDesktopApps :: IO [DotDesktopApp] getDotDesktopApps = do   appFolders <- getAppFolders+  appendFile "/home/tulth/.xmonad/debug.log" $+    unlines $ ("appfolder: " ++ ) <$> appFolders   contentsPerFolder <- mapM getDirContents appFolders   let folderFiles = join $ rights contentsPerFolder       dotDesktopFiles = filter isDotDesktop folderFiles@@ -63,6 +65,7 @@ getDotDesktopApps = do   let parseErrs = lefts parseResults       dotDesktopApps = rights parseResults   mapM_ print parseErrs+  appendFile "/home/tulth/.xmonad/debug.log" $ unlines parseErrs   return dotDesktopApps

I thought perhaps a parse failure in a folder would cause a bigger problem, but that was no issue on my system.
It give the expected result on my system and user and system desktops are listed, and the broken files i created show up.
debug.log:

appfolder: /home/tulth/.local/share/applicationsappfolder: /usr/share/applicationsParse Resulted in no KeyVals in file /home/tulth/.local/share/applications/broken_user.desktopParse Resulted in no KeyVals in file /usr/share/applications/broken_system.desktop

Any ideas? IsXDG_DATA_DIRS is set or no? On my systemXDG_DATA_DIRS is not set and it picks up defaults.

Any ideas?

Sorry, I was referring togtk-launch in that comment, not your implementation

@tulth what do you think about the idea of usinggtk-launch instead? Semms like a standard tool that people will definitely have installed and would simplify this quite a bit

@tulth what do you think about the idea of usinggtk-launch instead? Semms like a standard tool that people will definitely have installed and would simplify this quite a bit

I was thinking about this as well, but I do not think it makes much difference.
The .desktop files still have to be parsed to find the names and the filter out only applications. The only thing it saves is filtering out the %X patterns.

I was thinking about this as well, but I do not think it makes much difference. The .desktop files still have to be parsed to find the names and the filter out only applications. The only thing it saves is filtering out the %X patterns.

I don't use desktop files, so forgive my ignorance here, but the man page forgtk-launch says that it "launches an application using the given name". Does that mean there are.desktop files for things that aren't executable programs? What would those be? Wouldn'tgtk-launch also ignore them or does it do other things as well?

I note thatgtk-launch also knows how to activate an already running application instead of just starting a new one. (Of course, starting a new one should also do that.) This does, however, imply that some.desktop files may contain DBus activations instead of executables.

@tulth any updates?

@tulth friendly ping