Disappear

Free your launcher from cumbersome apps.

Disappear is a simple program to hide (or show) applications from your launcher.

Some packages like Wine, Java, glmark2, ... come with applications that I'm not interested in cluttering my app launcher.

Others such as GTK, GNOME, come with applications hidden by default that I want available in my app launcher.

Install

Dependencies GTK 4 and gjs.

git clone https://github.com/sonnyp/Disappear.git
cd Disappear
sudo ./install.sh

Update

cd Disappear
sudo ./uninstall.sh
git pull
sudo ./install.sh

Uninstall

cd disappear
sudo ./uninstall.sh

Known issues

• It might take a while for your desktop to pickup the update
• Reinstalling an application may override your preference
• Applications for which .desktop files are placed in subfolders are not supported yet
• Flatpak isn't possible at the moment

How does it work

Disappear uses the NoDisplay key from the Desktop Entry Specification.

For .desktop files installed in XDG_DATA_HOME (e.g. ~/.local/share/applications) Disappear will modify the file in place.

For desktop files installed system-wide (e.g. /usr/local/share/applications) Disappear will copy the .desktop file into XDG_DATA_HOME (which takes precedence) and modify it.

Neither of these is ideal so if you have better ideas please open an issue.

Alternatives considered

XDG_DATA_DIRS

An option could have been to add a directory, for example ~/.local/share/disappear to XDG_DATA_DIRS and write custom .desktop files but there are 2 issues with this

1. According to basedir spec XDG_DATA_HOME takes precedence over XDG_DATA_DIRS
2. Permanently setting/extending an environment variable is difficult for a plug'n play application like Disappear

GNOME Shell extension

If I don't find a reasonable solutions to known issues I might turn this into a GNOME Shell extension or at least use a GNOME Shell extension when possible.

Credits

Icon ripen pear by Vectors Market from the Noun Project.