Xfce Forum

cassiorenanac

Member

Registered: 2019-05-21

Posts: 3

appfinder doesn't find some applications

I've debated with myself for a while on if I should post this here on the forum or the bug tracker. My conclusion is that I should at least verify in the forum if this is intended behavior before burdening the developers with yet another issue.

I love appfinder. I even have the keybinding for it on just [Super L], instead of the default [Super L]+[R]. But ever since I started using it, something bugs me.

The issue is that, when autocompleting, appfinder seems to consider the "Exec" line on the .desktop entry of the applications, instead of the name of the application. For most of them, this is fine, because the exec line is only the name of the application (Examples of this are Atom, Thunar, Galculator, Mousepad, etc). But there are quite a few applications where this isn't true. Firefox's .desktop entry, for instance, looks like this:

Name=Firefox
(A lot of names in other languages...)
Exec=/usr/bin/firefox %u

To be fair, I actually use Firefox Developer Edition, so I may not be remembering the above lines correctly. For the developer edition, the binary is actually on the lib directory:

Name=Firefox Developer Edition
(A lot of names in other languages...)
Exec=/usr/lib/firefox-developer-edition/firefox %u

This means that if I type "fire" in the appfinder, it will never autocomplete it with "Firefox". It only does this if I type "/usr/bin/fire". To be fair, if I do press [down] twice, firefox will be highlighted on the expanded appfinder, and then I can just press [Enter], but that is two more keystrokes, when compared with applications that don't need this workaround at all.

Some examples that I can think of also are Insomnia, Slack, GParted, Vlc, VirtualBox, etc.

Is this indended? Shouldn't the appfinder be using the name for autocompletion instead? It certainly can find the applications by name, since they show up in the expanded form.

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: appfinder doesn't find some applications

I was a bit confused at first, thinking "but Appfinder doesn't autocomplete? does it? That would be xfrun", but I learned here that xfrun and xfce4-appfinder merged some time ago, so what we're seeing here is the difference between xfce4-appfinder and xfce4-appfinder --collapsed.

The former searches in the name of the application, the command, and the description (or commentary) fields of the desktop file.

The latter autocompletes from your command history.

There's some rationale in the discussion link I posted, perhaps someone more used to these changes can comment on if your experience qualifies as a bug, if there's a config you can tweak to your liking, or if there's a better solution possible that we can request as a new feature.

Welcome to the forum!

cassiorenanac

Member

Registered: 2019-05-21

Posts: 3

Re: appfinder doesn't find some applications

Thanks for the warm welcome!

That is quite interesting, yeah. Judging from it, it seems that implementing what I want is not trivial at all, seeing that appfinder would have to disambiguate between commands and application names somehow.

In my opinion it would be much better if commands were a custom action, instead of the default, since it is quite rare for me (and I'm guessing for most users) to need to use a command via the appfinder (since the terminal is much better at this).