How to create a desktop or menu item for an appimage program in Ubuntu
This quick and easy howto post shows how to create a menu or desktop item for `AppImage` applications in Ubuntu.
We assume the following for this example.
- Location of the
AppImage
file: ~/apps/navicat/ - Name of the
AppImage
file: navicat15-mysql-en.AppImage - Icon: ~/apps/app-icons/navicat.png
Create a new file in the folder ~/.local/share/applications named navicat.desktop. You can do from the Nautilus Filemanager or whatever filemanager you are using. Sudo is not required.
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Navicat
Comment=Navicat MySQL Database Manager
Exec=/home/yourhome/apps/navicat/navicat15-mysql-en.AppImage
Icon=/home/yourhome/apps/app-icons/navicat.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Development
That is all there is. The folder ~/.local/share/applications is watched automatically and when using the menu application Alacarte you see that after saving this file it is automatically updated.

with the following content:

and now you can search for it as well:
Google for the icon
Unfortunatel I haven't figured out on how to extract the icon from the AppImage file, but simply google to find the icon is not that much of a hassle. I have put the icons in a seperate folder, just to make sure that the icon doesn't disappear when I unintended delete the folder containing the program itself.
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Hi there, turns out if you make a copy of the AppImage file and change the extension to .zip, then you can access other things in that folder, such as, icon file, .desktop and much more depending on the AppImage folder. Cheers