blog dot kam

    Lately it has become a very painful experience for many people (according to forums/articles/open tickets) to add new launchers to Avant Window Navigator. I have taken a look at it and figured out a rather hacky approach to make it work.

    First I will manually create a "desktop" launcher.

( If you already have one, open it with any text editor (vi, gedit, etc..) and make sure it follows the structure of my "desktop" launcher )

   In order to create the launcher, I have to know two things:

       - the path to the file we would like to launch

       - the path to the icon we would like to use

    In this example, I am going to create a launcher to some program called Aptana, in your case it may be any other program. I know that Aptana executable file is located here: "/opt/aptana/Aptana". I also found an icon I would like to use for it, and put it here: "/home/user/icons/aptana_48×48.png".

    Now by knowing two these things, I can open my favorite text editor (vi, gedit, your favorite.. ) and type the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name[en_US]=aptana
Exec=/opt/aptana/Aptana
Comment[en_US]=+ RadRails
Icon[en_US]=/home/user/icons/aptana_48x48.png
Name=aptana
Comment=+ RadRails
Icon=/home/user/icons/aptana_48x48.png

    Notice the Exec and Icon parameters are populated with those two things. Name and Comment can be whichever you’d like them to be, in this case I just like them to make sense.

    Now I will save the file (you can save it on your desktop, or anywhere you want your launchers to live) as "aptana.desktop" (permissions could be "-rw-r–r–", or you can make it less restrictive if you like).

    And.. I am ready for the final step "drag & drop" (!). For this I go to the directory where I saved the "aptana.desktop" file using Nautilus/Konqueror/Other GUI browser, click on the file, drag it to Avant’s launcher bar, and drop it there. Tam tam tam - it is there -> I am done! So do you!

    Make sure your "desktop" file is the format shown above, since it is tested and works.