Erase shortcut arrows

[faslane]

Hi. How do you remove the shortcut arrow on a desktop icon?
(MX 18.3, XFCE)
thanks in advance.

[JayM]

What shortcut arrows? I don't see any.

P.S. Welcome to the forum. :)

[Eadwine Rose]

The shortcut arrow gets put on the icon because what you are seeing is just that, a shortcut. When you go to the actual spot the software is in there will be no shortcut arrow on that.


Can you tell us what you are trying to do exactly?

Right click on the icon you are referring to, and then click properties, what does it say at Location?

[JayM]

OK, now I see. If I right-click on an existing item on my desktop and choose create symlink it appears with the arrow in the lower-right corner of the icon indicating that it's a symbolic link to another file.

[faslane]

@ JayM

and choose create symlink it appears with the arrow in the lower-right corner of the icon indicating that it's a symbolic link to another file.

Right. I created a link from an app in Home, & put it on the Desktop. In Windows, getting rid of the shortcut arrow is a tweak on many DT managers - wondered if there's a fix in Linux.

[JayM]

You could create a .desktop launcher on your desktop instead of a symlink to the executable. For example if the app is named foobar you would create a file named foobar.desktop. This is an overview of how to create this file:
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-create-c ... s-on-linux
Basically foobar.desktop would contain the following information:

Code: Select all

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Exec=/path/to/executable
Name=Name of Application
Icon=/path/to/icon

What you can do to automate this process somewhat, using a GUI tool, is add a menu item that launches your application (right-click on the MX icon in the panel and choose add application.) Then in the menu, right-click on your app and choose add to desktop which copies the Whisker menu's launcher for that app to the desktop. Launchers aren't symlinks so their icons don't have arrows.

Also see https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8795

[faslane]

@JayM
Thanks.

[dolphin_oracle]

if you click on the desktop, the right click menu has add launcher items directly to the desktop as well.