shell-things/local/share/applications/README.md

Custom app menu entries

These can be used for either ~/.local/share/applications or /usr/local/share/applications which are read by graphical desktop environments for their app menus and default applications selections.

Additionally ~/.config/autostart or /etc/xdg/autostart could symlink here so graphical desktop environments started the apps on login.

• a-*.desktop
• Refreshing the menus
• Default applications

a-*.desktop

These files are companions to my script repos bash/usr-local-bin/* belonging to /usr/local/share/applications and are named so to avoid masking package manager. They have clearly different names such as using all caps.

Apparently one can also have subdirectories in /usr/local/share/applications/ and ~/.local/share/applications/ making life easier.

Refreshing the menus

update-desktop-database -v ~/.local/share/applications
sudo update-desktop-database -v /usr/local/share/applications

Default applications

Codium documentation points out the existence of ~/.config/mimeapps.list and gives these two examples:

[Default Applications]
inode/directory=org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop;

% grep directory /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache
inode/directory=codium.desktop
org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop

TODO: I wonder if it needs an update-desktop-database or similar though.