Arch Linux

myscha

Member

Registered: 2018-12-17

Posts: 6

Different .desktop files, icons and task bar grouping for VScode

Hello,

I'm on Arch with Plasma and currently I have multiple portable VScode directories. I'll refer to those as "installations". E.g. there is one installation with PlatformIO, another one for web development, one for C++ and so on. Each of those installations contains the necessary VScode structure and a data folder with extensions and user-data. To be able to choose the desired installation I have a .desktop file for each, which contains the path to the according binary, the icon, etc. I can start any of the installations once or multiple times, the grouping in the task bar works fine and different installations are grouped separately from each other, although the WM_CLASS of all installations is the same:

WM_CLASS(STRING) = "code", "Code"

The downside is, that I must update all installations manually. Therefore I would like to install code or vscodium. When I installed that and changed the Exec line in the .desktop files to

Exec=code --user-data-dir ~/path/to/user-data --extensions-dir ~/path/to/extensions

the installations behave like before, except that all installations have the same icon and are grouped as one.

The following image shows the difference although the same installations were started.

I read that some applications accept --class or --name as argument, but VScode doesn't. Is there a possibility to have different starters, icons and task groups but with the same base application?

Last edited by myscha (2023-02-22 20:52:19)