Create a shortcut for URL?

Question

How can I create a shortcut for URL in my desktop? I want to use them in Firefox or Chrome.

If a copy and paste didn't work.

What script I have to use?

score 71 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 30 '18 at 21:44

In Ubuntu an URL shortcut is stored in a .desktop file as follow (for example):

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Link to Ask Ubuntu
Type=Link
URL=http://www.askubuntu.com/
Icon=text-html

You can drag links from Firefox or Chrome and drop them on the Desktop or any other folder where you have permissions to save files.

Note: Link will appear on your Desktop or your file explorer (i.e. caja) under the name in the line Name=…, not by its actual filename. And without any ….desktop extension.

score 34 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 18 '21 at 06:08

34

This solution is multi-platform also:

Create a new simple text file with an .html extension and whatever name you want.

Edit the file with the program you want and add this content:

<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://askubuntu.com" />
    </head>
    <body> </body>
</html>

Save the file.

edited Oct 18 '21 at 06:08

karel

122,292
133
301
332

answered Nov 22 '19 at 02:29

lestcape

1,076

dualed · Answer 3 · 2019-08-26T17:27:27.420

I needed something like this, but Gnome (now?) requires *.desktop files to be in specific locations, so using those directly wouldn't solve my problem, as I wanted web-links for reference mostly in project folders. And they wouldn't be cross-platform compatible either.

Eventually I turned to Microsoft's .url files, which are easily constructed and look like this:

[InternetShortcut]
URL=https://askubuntu.com

^{(I read that the trailing line break is important, and probably should be \r\n for Windows compatibility)}

And created a .desktop specification to handle them:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=URL Handler
MimeType=application/x-mswinurl;
Exec=bash -c "set -e; P=$(python3 -c 'import configparser,sys,urllib.parse; c=configparser.ConfigParser(); c.read(sys.argv[1])\ntry:\n    u=c[\"InternetShortcut\"][\"URL\"]\n    if not urllib.parse.urlparse(u).scheme in [\"http\",\"https\",\"ftp\",\"ssh\"]: raise Exception(\"Invalid scheme in URI\")\n    print(u)\nexcept Exception as e: print(e,file=sys.stderr); exit(3);' %f); xdg-open \"$P\""

Put that into a file in ~/.local/share/applications/<whatever>.desktop. In my case Gnome immediately bound *.url files to them.

This requires xdg-utils package (for xdg-open, it's likely there if you have a desktop-environment) and python 3.

I really really didn't want to use python, but doing unchecked parsing on something like this didn't suit me. The largest parts of the python script are to avoid infinite loops among other dangers -- in case someone gets funny ideas and puts a file name in a .url file. It ensures that a scheme is present and is one of http(s), ftp, ssh. I guess that list can be easily extended, but I actually don't know which schemes Windows supports.

score 7 · Answer 4 · edited Aug 12 '24 at 22:51

Add this to your ~/.bashrc:-

function createUrlShortcut {
    if [ "$#" -ne 3 ]; then
        echo "Illegal number of parameters. Usage : createUrlShortcut Name Url FileBaseName"
    fi
    printf '[Desktop Entry]\nEncoding=UTF-8\nName=%s\nType=Link\nURL=%s\nIcon=text-html\n' "$1" "$2" > ~/Desktop/"$3.desktop"
}

To create a shortcut, do as follows:-

createUrlShortcut RGB-Dataset https://vision.in.tum.de/data/datasets/rgbd-dataset/download RGBD-Dataset-Link

The first argument is the name you want to be displayed in nautilus.
The second argument is the url.
The third argument is the actual name of the file which will be appended by .Desktop extension.

Note that this will create a file with name RGBD-Dataset-Link.desktop but will be displayed as RGB-Dataset in nautilus.

sangorys · Answer 5 · 2022-02-11T17:03:29.987

Additionally, like all solutions that involve a command line, one can do it with a the mouse in three steps in a Chromium like browser :

Click on the menu (the three vertical dots on top right).
Click on "more tools…"
Click on "create application shortcut" to create a shortcut on your desktop
(depending on your configuration) : You could need to right click on the shortcut and add execution permissions

Afterward, one .desktop file shall be added to the desktop of the creator.

score 5 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 22 '13 at 08:32

Try this. Install Gnome Panel, just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command(s) below:

sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

Once installed type this:

gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ~/path/to/shortcut

(location of shortcut). In the example below, I will create a shortcut for Ubuntu.com and place it inside the Documents folder. Once I hit Enter a window will open with the properties. See images below.

gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ~/Documents

enter image description here

Once done, just click on them newly created shortcut.

score 3 · Answer 7 · edited Aug 25 '20 at 16:43

You can just copy the following into a text file and save it with a .desktop file extension in the desktop folder

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=google-chrome http://google.com
Name=the name of the shortcut
Icon=/path/to/your/photo

This works for me on Ubuntu 20.04. It uses the terminal for launching a URL. you can change google-chrome to firefox if you like that browser more.

I tried different things but this was the one that helped me out.

IniasP · Answer 8 · 2021-05-19T15:36:13.110

Edit: using Type=Link is superior (see accepted answer).

As some others suggested, a desktop file launching the browser with the url as an argument works really well. I would like to add that you can pass it to xdg-open (installed by default) instead of firefox or google-chrome, to open up the default browser instead of having the browser hardcoded into the file.

Something like:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Shortcut name
Exec=xdg-open https://example.com/
Type=Application
Icon=applications-internet

Don't forget to include the protocol (https:// in this case), or xdg-open will be looking for a directory instead.

Then, make sure to right click the file on the desktop and select "Allow Launching" (Ubuntu 20.04) to turn it into a desktop icon.

Be1newinner · Answer 9 · 2022-09-03T16:14:01.350

2

This way will work in All OS {Android, Linux, Windows, Mac}

Create a File With your shortcut name with extension .html e.g. google.html
open in text editor and paste

<script>
window.location.href='URL of Website with HTTPS://'
</script>

Thats it...

edited Sep 03 '22 at 16:14

answered Sep 03 '22 at 16:13

Be1newinner

21
3

score 1 · Answer 10 · edited Jul 31 '21 at 00:49

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 and most the answers didn't work for me.

What worked for me is creating a .desktop file in the Desktop with below code (you can change firefox to google-chrome and add icon if you want to).

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=clickup - Google Search
Exec=firefox https://www.google.com/search?q=clickup&oq=clickup&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l9.1847j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

and then right click the file and select Allow Launching:

If the Allow Launching option is not there:

Click Properties and click the Permission tab.
Change Others access to read only and group,owner access to read and write, and;
Don't forget to tick Allow executing file as a program.

Allow Launching should be visible now so click it and there you have your shortcut.

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered May 04 '24 at 23:19

Still an actual problem ...

Most browsers will create a .desktop file, if the internet-address will be dragged from the browser to the file manager or the desktop. A double click on this file opens the address in the default browser.

The main problem with these .desktop files: Mostly these are containing the address data as the file name. If saved on NTFS drives, this can cause conflicts and troubles for system maintenance, backups, system crashes and more, because these names are containing illegal characters for the NTFS file system.

So don't use it on NTFS drives.

This is my experience on:

Operating System: Ubuntu Studio 22.04 KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.7 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.92.0 Qt Version: 5.15.3 Kernel Version: 6.5.0-26-lowlatency (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 16 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-13700K Memory: 62.5 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060/PCIe/SSE2

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered Nov 28 '20 at 00:40

Wow this was sticky! So many answers with such complexity, here is a clean solution -

Solution

QuickCut - Add a context menu to quickly save shortcut files (url, desktop, webloc)

Procedure

Navigate to Add-Ons Page
Select '+ Add to Firefox'
Select the QuickCut icon on upper right of toolbar to generate a link to the active page
Navigate to Downloads/ to retrieve your new shortcut

Done!

Witalis · Answer 13 · 2020-12-20T16:10:43.977

I had the same problem with creation shortcuts from chromium, and I found how to fix it for myself: for example -

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
Desktop Entry
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Type=Application 
Name=Free Rice App
Exec=/snap/chromium/1424/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome --profile- 
directory=Default --app-id=pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic
Icon=chrome-pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic-Default
StartupWMClass=crx_pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic

I just add "chromium" to exec, and now it's work for me, and the final code looks like -

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=Free Rice App
Exec=chromium /snap/chromium/1424/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome --
profile-directory=Default --app-id=pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic
Icon=chrome-pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic-Default
StartupWMClass=crx_pjnkpknhgjomoapaopdalojkjohlheic

score 0 · Answer 14 · answered Nov 27 '22 at 01:54

I'm using Zorin Core + Chrome. In Chrome, go to More Tools/Create Shortcut (just like in Windows). This will create a file on your desktop but it doesn't do anything so delete it. Look in Start/Google Apps. There it is! Right click on it and choose to add to Favorites (taskbar) or desktop. These shortcuts have the web site's icon, BTW. You can delete them from Start/Google Apps using the Main Menu app in Zorin.

progonkpa · Answer 15 · 2024-02-05T18:08:17.073

I added a function in ~/.bashrc so I can create a shortcut from the terminal with:

wlink "https://fabsite.net"

Here's the code.

url_to_filename() {
  echo "${1/@/AT}" |
    tr '/' '-' |
    tr '.' '_' |
    tr ':' '_' |
    tr '=' '_' |
    tr -d '"' |
    tr -d "'" |
    tr -d '\\' |
    tr -d '$' |
    tr -d '%' |
    tr '?' '_' |
    tr '&' '-'
}
wlink() {
  wlink_dir="$(pwd)"
  [ -n "$2" ] && wlink_dir="$2"
  ! [ -d "$wlink_dir" ] && echo "not a directory '$wlink_dir', abort" && return
wlink_url="$1"
  wlink_url="$(echo "$wlink_url" | sed 's/\//g')"  # remove backslashes
  sanitized_url="$(url_to_filename "$wlink_url")"
  sanitized_url="${sanitized_url#https_--}" # remove https:// segment from filename
  wlink_file="${wlink_dir}/${sanitized_url}.desktop"
echo "[Desktop Entry]" >> "$wlink_file"
  echo "Encoding=UTF-8" >> "$wlink_file"
  echo "Name=$wlink_file" >> "$wlink_file"
  echo "Type=Link" >> "$wlink_file"
  echo "URL=$wlink_url" >> "$wlink_file"
  echo "Icon=text-html" >> "$wlink_file"
echo "created shortcut for url:"
  echo "${wlink_url}"
  echo "at:"
  echo "${wlink_file}"
}

Create a shortcut for URL?

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