Desktop entry for IDEA, RubyMine, PHPStorm or any other JetBrains product

I haven't found any article describing how to accomplish this on a linux computer using GNOME 3:

I did it myself earlier today and will now share it. All JetBrains products are the same on linux, so the files I present can be changed for RubyMine, WebStorm or PHPStorm as well, My example is for IDEA.

To create a desktop entry for IDEA, 4 things are required:

• IDEA is installed somewhere on your computer.
• /usr/local/bin/idea, to simplify launch.
• idea.desktop, placed in /usr/share/applications.
• idea.png symlinked to /usr/local/share/icons.

TL:DR;¶

Here is a gist: IDEA 12 Desktop Entry for GNOME

Installing IDEA¶

This is propably already done, but if not: download it from JetBrains and untar it somewhere. IDEA strongly recommends Oracle JDK.

launcher script: /usr/local/bin/idea¶

<idea_dir>/idea.sh could simply be symlinked to /usr/local/bin/idea, I prefer to take it a step further.

#!/bin/bash
# /usr/local/bin/idea
export IDEA_JDK=/opt/java # Oracle JDK!
<idea_dir>/bin/idea.sh

Call it lazy, but since IDEA_JDK is only needed by IDEA I prefer to set it like that. In this way the IDEA_JDK is always there, anyways. Don't forget to chmod +x.

The desktop entry: idea.desktop¶

Nothing uncommon here:

# /usr/share/applications/idea.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=12
Type=Application
Exec='/usr/local/bin/idea' %f
Icon=idea
Name=IntelliJ IDEA
Comment=Full-featured commercial IDE
NoDisplay=false
Categories=TextEditor;Programming;

Copy it to /usr/share/applications/idea.desktop and change it if needed.

Getting the Icon¶

Icons are stored in various places in the filesystem. For IDEA, I prefer /usr/local/share/icons. JetBrains has a PNG in the ./bin dir, so a symlink is all that is needed.

ln -s <idea_dir>/bin/idea.png /usr/local/share/icons/idea.png

All set¶

Now it is possible launch IDEA by press Win, type idea and press Enter. It sure is more sexy than running <dir>/idea.sh & from the console.