desktopentries

A simple tool for displaying and querying desktop entries

Features

• A simple way to query and display desktop entries
• Supports localized keys (f.e. Name, Comment, etc.)
• Supports RegEx

Installation

You can install the tool via cargo:

cargo install desktopentries

Usage

To display all desktop entries, run desktopentries with no arguments:

desktopentries

To display all desktop entries whose Type is Application, run desktopentries with the a flag:

desktopentries -a

To display all desktop entries whose name is like foo case insensitively, contains foo and bar as keywords, are terminal applications and are not hidden, run desktopentries as:

desktopentries -tH -n "(?i)foo" -k foo bar

To list all possible flags and options, run desktopentries with the help option:

desktopentries --help

Notes

This tool tries to follow the Desktop Entry Specification. It looks for the entries in directories specified by $XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable. If the variable is not present, the tool looks for the entries in /usr/share/applications/ directory.

If multiple entry files with the same ID exist, the one located in the first entry directory will be chosen. If the files exist in the same entry directory, the one which was detected first by Rust's std::fs::read_dir() will be used (default behaviour is undefined by the specification).

The output of this tool consists of the paths to the desktop entry files with their contents which match the specified flags and options. To extract particular lines from the output, you can use a tool such as grep and pipe the output of this tool to it.

You can combine multiple flags and options, however, some of them are mutually exclusive as specified in the specification (f.e. you cannot query for an entry which is of Type Application and contains a URL key).

All options take RegEx as values, so you can use them to query the entries as well. The tool uses The Rust Project Developers's regex crate under the hood, so it does not support Lookarounds (Lookahead, Lookbehind).

The tool also supports localized keys as well. When the -g flag is provided, the tool looks for the value of $LC_MESSAGES environment variable and uses it for searching. You can specify a different language using the -G option, however, it does not check whether the value specified is a correct locale code.