.desktop

The Algorithm by which ‘Docky’ Determines the .desktop File Associated with a Window

August 28, 2014 Linux 1 comment , , ,

UPDATE: I’ve created a Python implementation of this algorithm. It’s available here.

I was curious how docks seem able to determine the correct icon (ie find the correct .desktop file) for applications even when their .desktop files lack the StartupWMClass key. So I had a look at the source code for ‘Docky’. After a little figuring out of the, almost entirely uncommented :(, code, I determined that the algorithm goes like this, stopping on the first successful step:

  • Check if there is a .desktop file with the appropriate StartupWMClass.
  • See if there is a .desktop file whose name is the same as that of the WM_CLASS of the window.
  • Then check if the window belongs to ‘OpenOffice’, ‘LibreOffice’ or ‘Wine’.
  • Look for a .desktop file whose name is the same as that of the WM_CLASS of the window with all . characters removed.
  • Check if the process name matches the Exec field of any .desktop file.
  • Finally, check if the window command matches the Exec field of any .desktop file.

Here is the relevant method starting a line 165 of Docky.Services/Docky.Services/WindowMatcherService.cs in Docky-2.2.0:

See the full code here.

Automatically Set Windows’ Icons based on GNOME Theme

July 17, 2014 Linux No comments , , , , ,

I’ve got a very nice Moka+Numix icon theme which works well with my dock and Nautilus, but unfortunately Openbox wasn’t picking up on it (not surprisingly, since the icon theme is a GNOME thing). As a result, the icons in Openbox’s Alt-Tab Switcher were inconsistent with the rest of my desktop.

It turns out that Openbox was using the icon specified in the X properties of the window. This is set by the application itself. Fortunately, there’s a rather useful xseticon script made by Paul “LeoNerd” Evans that allows for the modification of these icons. Together with Devil’s Pie, a look at the XDG Icon Theme Specifications, and small script, this allowed me to automatically set the icon for all windows, so that now everything is nice and consistent.

This requires xseticon, python-xdg, and xprop, all of which are in the Debian repositories (Wheezy).

The Devil’s Pie configuration file is:

Replace $HOME with your home directory.

The ~/.local/bin/set-xdg-icon looks like:

This can certainly be adapted for use with KDE, by just using whatever analogue of gsettings KDE has when determining the icon theme.

Note that some .desktop files don’t have the StartupWMClass set. In order to get the corresponding applications to work with this, you’ll need to add it with the WM_CLASS found by xprop‘ing the appropriate window.

Here’s a Gist.

Open Mailto Links with Gmail in Debian and GNOME

July 15, 2014 Linux No comments , , , ,

This is a nice way of having mailto: links open in Gmail with Debian and GNOME (it’ll probably work with other online email providers and other Linux distributions and other desktop environments).

All you need to do is create a file named gmail.desktop in the /usr/share/applications directory (you should probably be able to install it locally in ~/.local/share/applications, if you prefer) and add the following:

Then ‘Gmail’ should be listed as an option in Gnome Settings > Details > Default Applications (you may need to run sudo xdg-desktop-menu forceupdate first).

Note, here I’m using Debian’s sensible-browser command to launch the default web browser.