Can I edit which icons appear in the Unity dash?

Question

When I open the dash in 11.04, I get two rows of icons. The first row contains 'lenses' that take me to lists of applicaitons/files; the second row opens specific applications - Browse the Web, View Photos, Check Email, Listen to Music.

Is there any way to change what programs the icons in the second row point to? (If I were to add new lenses, do they also appear, and can I change the order?) So far it seems like the Browse the Web and Listen to Music icons respect my preferred applications choices. The first can be either Firefox or Chromium (and perhaps others) and the second can be either Banshee or Rhythmbox. However, I can't change the Check Email icon. It remains pinned to Evolution, even though I have Thunderbird set as my preferred email client. I'd like to change this if I can.

Answer 1

To change default applications, click the power/settings menu in the top right corner of your screen (the one with the OFF symbol) and select last item (System Settings).

Select Preferred Applications in the window that will appear, so you can change them.

As far as I know, it is not possible to add additional items in the Unity Dash.

Answer 2

I understand what he meant, in the old days you could right click on menu and edit, now the answer is to install alacarte.

sudo apt-get install alacarte

Alacarte can be run from the terminal or the Unity Dash.

Answer 3

The mail problem known bug in Unity. The bug is reported here and is fixed for 11.04

Answer 4

Unfortunately in 11.04/11.10 there is no way to arbitrarily change the shortcuts in the dash to any application you want unless you edit the source code directly.

However if you set your browser, mail program, and mp3 player in Preferred Applications Unity will respect those settings.

Answer 5

I got this working using a slightly modified version of this question's first answer What Custom Launchers and Unity Quicklists are available?

I'm not sure it's the best way though; among other things, I had to hardcode in my homedir path because it wouldn't work if I used ~ or $HOME. This launches nautilus, but you could run anything by changing the 'Exec' line.

Instructions:

Copy 'Home Folder' launcher file to your home directory:

cp /usr/share/applications/nautilus-home.desktop ~/.local/share/applications

Open the file for editing in gedit:

gedit ~/.local/share/applications/nautilus-home.desktop

Find the following line from the file:

OnlyShowIn=GNOME;

Replace the above line with:

OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;

Add this text to the bottom of the file, substituting in your home directory path:

X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=Videos;Documents;Music;Pictures;Downloads
[Videos Shortcut Group]
Name=Videos
Exec=nautilus /home/YOURUSERNAME/Videos
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Documents Shortcut Group]
Name=Documents
Exec=nautilus /home/YOURUSERNAME/Documents
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Music Shortcut Group]
Name=Music
Exec=nautilus /home/YOURUSERNAME/Music
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Pictures Shortcut Group]
Name=Pictures
Exec=nautilus /home/YOURUSERNAME/Pictures
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Downloads Shortcut Group]
Name=Downloads
Exec=nautilus /home/YOURUSERNAME/Downloads
TargetEnvironment=Unity

Save and close the file.

Log out and log in again to see the changes.

Answer 6

Some nice people are already developing a solution to your problem.

https://launchpad.net/unity-launcher-editor

Please be patient, as it is not yet ready for use.

Answer 7

How to Create a custom launcher in Unity?


The link above should give you an answer.
Like

http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/10/15-things-i-did-after-installing-new.html

Answer 8

"Unfortunately in 11.04 there is no way to arbitrarily change the shortcuts in the dash to any application you want."

To be honest you're not telling the truth ... you can change the entries in the applications menu just as you can change anything on your system ( it's open source people ! ). The problem is that most people don't know where to look ^^.

When it comes to the applications shown in your menu they can all be found under the /usr/share/applications directory. Every entry is of the file-type "*.desktop", these are textual files and you can edit them in vim or gedit ( do know that they're under root, so either chown them or sudo edit them ). If you delete the entry it won't show up in your menu anymore :). As for adding entries, it is just a matter of learning how to write a *.desktop file and placing it in the applications directory.

To learn more about the ".desktop" file format i'll refer you to http://linuxcritic.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/anatomy-of-a-desktop-file/ :) enjoy !

This might be a wee bit archaic ^ ^ but give the open source community a few more months and someone will have written an updated version of alacarte that does this for you :)