DotDesktop4Win

Partial Windows implementation of the Freedesktop.org Desktop Entry specification. This is mainly going to allow launching applications by double-clicking on .desktop files.

There's another project called WinYourDesktop that does more than this project will probably ever do, as this project is only a partial implementation and doesn't include everything to make itself fully compliant with the Freedesktop.org Desktop Entry spec. Some things that would make this fully compliant don't make sense on Windows as-is, such as menu entries, icons, and actions. Locale strings probably won't be supported, either, so they'll just be regular strings instead.

In order to read .desktop files, a fork of MadMilkman.Ini built for .NET Standard 2.0 is being used.

Switching TabControl tabs with the mouse wheel is implemented using libscrollswitchtabs, part of the drews-libs project.

Planned features

• Starting an application with the Exec key's value, including by double-clicking the file if it's associated with the launcher program.
• Showing how the desktop entry file is interpreted in a program just for that. This program will have a Browse dialog.
• Type, Name, Exec, and URL keys will be supported at the very least.
• Comments with the # symbol will act as comments and not cause issues.
• When opening a .desktop file with the launcher application, it'll process it and open the thing the file wants. Opening the launcher program directly will show a dialog where a .desktop file can be browsed for in addition to any configuration options, if needed.
• If the application or whatever is to be launched cannot be found, then the user will be made aware.
• In the program that views .desktop files, the filename will be added to the beginning of the window's titlebar, followed by the application name.
  • Same for the launcher program.
  • Example: Firefox.desktop - LaunchDotDesktop
• If a required key isn't present in the file, then sane defaults will be used instead.

Building and Modifying

You can build this project by opening the DotDesktop4Win.sln file in Visual Studio 2019 Community, which is the version being used for the project. Newer versions may work, but that's the version being used.

If you don't want to manually build it, you can use the build artifacts instead.

More detail will be added to this section eventually, but this is just here for now.