How to add shortcut onto Wine desktop?

Wine has a "desktop mode" where it renders a virtual desktop in a window and renders all its windows within that desktop. You can access it through:

wine explorer /desktop=arbname,1920x1200 "C:\...\...\application.exe"

I used it and some applications have installed icons on the virtual desktop:

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Those shortcuts (.lnk files) are located in ~/.wine/drive_c/users/Public/Desktop/, but are binary files.

How can I create a custom one?

Note: I am not asking how to create a shortcut to a Wine app on my Ubuntu desktop.


With an amount of pain and suffering, fossfreedom's suggestion paid off. I didn't try the VBScript method, mainly because I didn't know how much of that is actually implemented in Wine. There was also mention of add-on packs that don't seem to be present in Wine.

So that left me with the Shortcut.exe method from alfasin.

  1. Download Shortcut.exe from its creator
  2. Unzip it and make it available somewhere under your WINEPREFIX (I used ~/.wine/drive_c/)
  3. Run wineconsole to get a cmd.exe-like environment
  4. From there, cd to whereever your shortcut.exe live and use it. Here's what I ran:

    Shortcut /a:c /f:"%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Desktop\Borderlands2.lnk" /t:"C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Borderlands 2\Binaries\Win32\Borderlands2.exe"
    

If nothing else it has provided me with a renewed (and thoroughly deserved) hatred towards Windows.


Go to your user folder in ~/.wine/drive_c/users/ and to "Start Menu", "Programs" and copy the shortcut you want and paste it in ~/.wine/drive_c/users/Public/Desktop/

You can create a launch shortcut in your linux with for example this command line:

wine explorer /desktop=arbname,1920x1080 "C:/Program Files/Windows NT/Accessories/wordpad.exe"

The wine window close when you close this wordpad but, if you reduce it, all the other wine software is accessible from the desktop.