Add manually installed application to 'Show Applications' grid in Ubuntu 18.04

18.04 gnome-shell

You can do that by creating a launcher for the application (.desktop file) in your ~/.local/share/applications directory.

If you want the application to be available to all users, you can put the .desktop file in the /usr/share/applications directory.

First create an empty text file, name it something like <application-name>.desktop, and add the following lines to it

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Application Name
Comment=A short description of the application
Exec=/full/path/to/application/executable
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/full/path/to/icon-file

Then save the file. If it doesn't appear in 'Show Applications' grid straightaway, log out and login again.

You can do the same by using GUI applications, for example 'Main Menu' (aka alacarte). Install it by running the following command in Terminal

sudo apt-get install alacarte

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