unity quicklists

You can create quicklists for Unity's launcher buttons to make it easier to get to certain tasks and applications. To get an idea of the kinds of things that can be done, visit this web page at askubuntu.com or do a web search using the search terms unity quicklist.

In Ubuntu Natty, I created a couple of launcher buttons that when I right-click on them show some of my favorite applications. The first thing I had to do was create the directory ~/.local/share/applications.

I'll show how I created a Graphics button containing a couple of applications, KSnapshot and Geeqie. To begin, I created the graphics.desktop file using the following command:

$ gedit ~/.local/share/applications/graphics.desktop

The contents of that file:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Exec=
Name=Graphics
Icon=/usr/share/icons/Humanity/categories/48/applications-graphics.svg
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=KSnapShot;Geeqie;

[KSnapShot Shortcut Group]
Name=ksnapshot
Exec=ksnapshot
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Geeqie Shortcut Group]
Name=geeqie
Exec=geeqie
TargetEnvironment=Unity

The order of the list of shortcuts on the "X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=" line determines the order that they'll appear when you right-click on the button. If you have other "shortcut groups" defined below that line, only the ones in the "X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=" line will appear when you right-click on the button.

Once I created the file, I simply drag-and-dropped the file from Dolphin onto the launcher.

If you make changes to the .desktop file, you'll have to log out and log back into your Unity session.

A couple of shots to show how it turned out:

Here's the entire desktop, showing my "Utilities" button with its quicklist opened up: