Introduction

For this purpose you actually have AppImageLauncher for the convenience, or the apps would actually self-generate this for you, but this doesn’t always happen. However, if you do mind the bloatness of said app (300 MB-ish), or the devs just don’t have the launcher ready, then you may consider making the launcher yourself, by hand.

AppImage Launcher Template (AppName.desktop)

This is my standard template for almost every AppImage:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Application Name
GenericName=App Type
Categories=Utility;
Comment=Brief description of the application
Exec=/path/to/application.AppImage
Icon=/path/to/icon.png
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true

Explanations (don’t copy this part to your file, please):

  • Version - The app version. If you got too lazy to find which version it is, you may leave it as 1.0.0
  • Type - Just leave it as “Application”
  • Name - Write your App name here, you can use any name you like.
  • GenericName - Categories name for human-view (Web Browser, Utilities, System, etc.)
  • Categories - Categories name for machine, similar to that of GenericName, but you can’t have space or special character inside
  • Comment - A brief description of what your app does
  • Exec - Path to the app’s executable
  • Icon - Path to the app’s icon (sometimes, the app is able to display the icon by itself, although you didn’t set the icon path)
  • Terminal - Whether to invoke the terminal when open the app. Highly recommend leaving it as false, unless for specific reasons
  • StartupNotify - Would the app notify you when it launches? This one is depending on your need. By default, it is true

Then open up your favourite text editor (vim, notepad, vscode, etc.), copy and save the file as your_app.desktop at ~/.local/share/applications, or anywhere you feel convenient to store (I personally like ~/AppImage).