James Titcumb

For some time now I’ve had a problem in Avant Window Navigator where Eclipse and Outlook (don’t ask…) were appearing as separate icons. The first answer here was pretty much the solution. I use the built-in awn launcher editor to manually add my launchers. However this means you cannot specify extra hidden fields such as how to match the Windows up. Thankfully this wasn’t too complex. I went into ~/.local/share/applications and created two files with these contents:

outlook.desktop:
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Office
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec="/home/james/bin/outlook.sh"
Hidden=true
Icon=/home/james/.icons/outlook.png
Name=Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
StartupWMClass=OUTLOOK.EXE
Type=Application

eclipse-php.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Programming
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec="/opt/eclipse-php/eclipse-php"
Hidden=true
Icon=/opt/eclipse-php/eclipse.png
Name=Eclipse for PHP Developers
StartupWMClass=Eclipse for PHP Developers
Type=Application

The important part is the “StartupWMClass“, which (annoyingly) cannot be specified in the awn launcher configuration. To get the correct StartupWMClass value for your application, in a terminal write:

$ xprop | grep WM_CLASS
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "OUTLOOK.EXE", "Wine"
$

Then click on the window you are trying to find the StartupWMClass of. The one you want to use is the first one returned, OUTLOOK.EXE in this case. Then all you need to do is open ~/.local/share/applications in Nautilus, and drag the .desktop file down into awn where the “+” sign appears. BOOM! Now my little yellow blips appear next to the original launcher and means I don’t keep opening multiple instances of Outlook/Eclipse by mistake!