How to create your own Desktop icon in Ubuntu?

Photo by Karol on Unsplash

The cool thing about Ubuntu is that you can pretty much create your own Desktop icon for just about any executable. It can be a bash script, a c++ machine code executable, a python script or a .jar file.

Before we step through the intricacies of this, the following is the only pre-requisite needed:

1. An Ubuntu computer (or VM)

Step 1:

Start by creating a file with a .desktop extension. Do not worry about where this file is created for now. We will eventually shift the file to the right location.

touch new_app.desktop

Step 2:

Add the following into the file:

Version: This indicates which version of the Desktop Entry Specification is being used. Typically “1.0” is used as per: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-1.0.html. Do take note that this field can be omitted

Type: There are 3 types, Application (type 1), Link (type 2) and Directory (type 3). In our case we will be using Application .

Terminal: This indicates whether a terminal window should be opened. In our case this is not needed.

Exec: This is the path to the executable.

Name: This is the name of the application.

Icon: This is the path to the icon that will be used as the desktop application.

Example Desktop File

Step 3:

Place the above file in .local/share/applicatons.