Evince Document Viewer Menu Entry

Alan LaMielle — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:20:53 +0000

I has always bothered me that Gnome’s document viewer, evince, doesn’t show up in the Gnome menus or in Gnome-Do when I type evince. I did a bit of searching and discovered that this is because the evince .desktop files have the property NoDisplay=true in them. Apparently this tells Gnome to ignore this application for display purposes (in menus, dialogs, gnome-do, etc.). I changed this property to false and am waiting for whatever .desktop cache there is to update. I’ll update this post if this actually worked for me. I hope it does, being able to launch evince with one command in Gnome-Do would be wonderful.

I found this bug and this discussion of why NoDisplay is set to true.

Update (2009-9-27 19:13): After waiting for a while to see if evince would ever show up in the menus/gnome-do, it appears that this ‘fix’ doesn’t work. I’m not willing to put more time into this, so my current work-around is to open a directory with the pdf of interest and open the file that way. Not my preferred workflow, but it gets the job done.

Update (2009-10-7 08:46): A commenter suggested removing the NoDisplay line altogether. I’ve commented these lines out in the files /usr/share/applications/evince.desktop and /usr/share/app-install/desktop/evince.desktop. I’ll leave it like that and see if an entry for Evince shows up anwhere. I’ve actually gotten into the habbit of opening a directory in Nautilus and opening the document in question from there. If this works though, I’ll have multiple ways of doing what I want.

Update (2009-10-10 07:34): Removing the lines didn’t help. Looks like I’ll just continue using the ‘Open in Nautilus’ method.

alan.lamielle.net » NoDisplay

Evince Document Viewer Menu Entry