How to create a desktop or menu item for an appimage program 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.