Arch Linux

MetaNova

Member

Registered: 2014-11-24

Posts: 3

hide-icon.sh - A Small Script to Hide Annoying Application Icons

If you are super-OCD like me, and you can't stand those ugly icons for applications that are forced to be on your system due to dependencies, I've written a little script to create .desktop files with "NoDisplay=true" in your ~/.local/share/applications directory based on a list you supply it.

To use it, just run

./hide-icon.sh list_of_desktop_file_names.txt

The script will also remove any .desktop files for applications that are no longer installed (that are in the list file).

Script:

#!/bin/sh

APPLICATION_PATH="/usr/share/applications"
USER_APPLICATION_PATH="${HOME}/.local/share/applications"

for FILE in `cat $1`; do
        if [ -e "${APPLICATION_PATH}/${FILE}" ]; then
                echo "Creating file ${USER_APPLICATION_PATH}/${FILE}"
                echo "NoDisplay=true" > "${USER_APPLICATION_PATH}/${FILE}"
        elif [ ! -e "${APPLICATION_PATH}/${FILE}" ] && [ -e "${USER_APPLICATION_PATH}/${FILE}" ]; then
                echo "Deleting unnecessary file ${USER_APPLICATION_PATH}/${FILE}"
                rm "${USER_APPLICATION_PATH}/${FILE}" 
        fi
done

My personal list file:

assistant-qt4.desktop
avahi-discover.desktop
bssh.desktop
bvnc.desktop
CMake.desktop
designer-qt4.desktop
ipython-qtconsole.desktop
jconsole.desktop
linguist-qt4.desktop
policytool.desktop
qdbusviewer-qt4.desktop
qtconfig-qt4.desktop
qv4l2.desktop
gda-control-center-5.0.desktop
gda-browser-5.0.desktop
nvidia-settings.desktop
hplip.desktop
ipython.desktop
zenmap.desktop
zenmap-root.desktop

Hope this helps someone make their application list less cluttered.