Adding an Appimage application to menu and Docky

Hi all,

I am writing this post for people who are looking to add appimage apps into Docky. Prerequisites for this to work is that you should have a working appimage application and that you should have Docky installed.

First thing to do is to get the appimage file of the software you want to add to Docky. Make sure the application runs ok before trying this(I am going to use kdenlive as an example here).

After downloading the appimage file, you need to make it executable by going to the file properties and making it an executable file.

 

Close the file properties and double click the appimage icon to run it.

Once you have verified that the application runs, we need to first create a .desktop file for it, so that the application can be found from the Menu. Close the application and open a terminal and follow the steps below

[$] cd /usr/share/applications

We need to create a new .desktop file here. You can either copy and paste a file that is already here and modify it, or create an entirely new file. Keep in mind that you need root permission for doing any file operations here.

[$] sudo vi kdenlive.desktop

You can use your editor of choice of course :-D.

Your file should look something like below

[Desktop Entry]
Name=KDEnlive
Comment=Non Linear Video Editor
GenericName=Video Editor
Exec=/home/ajith/Applications/Kdenlive-17.12.0d-x86_64.AppImage   #make sure to change the below path to the path in your system
Icon=kdenlive   #the icon name for your application will be different
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Qt;KDE;AudioVideo;AudioVideoEditing;
MimeType=application/x-kdenlive;


Once you are done creating the file, verify the file by running the below command. It should run without giving any errors or output if the .desktop file validates successfully. If not, check your file and make sure there is no typo, or that the settings are correct for your application.

[$] desktop-file-validate kdenlive.desktop

Now, the application should show up in your Menu.

Open your application by clicking on it. If all is well, your application should open up just fine.

Hoorray!! You have successfully added your appimage application to the menu. We are not done yet though.

When your application opens up, it will show up in the Docky dock.

Right click the icon of the application in Docky and select Pin to Dock and your application is pinned to Docky. The icon will stay there even after closing the application.

In case, the icon does not show up

In certain situations, the application you are running may not have the necessary application icons pre-installed with your OS. In that case do the following. Otherwise you can skip this.

Appimage applications are self contained, so everything related to the app resides inside the appimage file. Naturally, the icon will also be there.

Let’s extract the appimage file and get the icons

./Kdenlive-17.12.0d-x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract

This should extract the contents into a new directory named squashfs-root right next to your appimage. You can find the icons below

cd squashfs-root/usr/share/icons/
ls


You should be able to see one or more folders. All the icons related to your application resides here. Next, we have to copy this to our system icons directory for desktop entry to be able to pick the icon

sudo cp -r * /usr/share/icons/


Voila! Your application should have the proper icon now. In case the Docky icon does not change, remove the application from Docky and add it again using the steps above.

I have tried this in linux mint 18.3. I am pretty sure this will work in Ubuntu as well. As for the other distros, I have not tried it. May be you, the reader can try it and let me know in the comments below.

Happy Computing!