Adding a placeholder to the desktop while a program starts

[rufwoof]

Running Debian LXDE frugally installed, with a range of program icons in the main panel (favourites) for quicker/easier launching. Under LXDE however there's no 'hourglass' type launching indicator, you click the icon and ... wait, with no visual indicator of whether you correctly clicked or not the icon. Many other systems (KDE, Gnome...etc) have a visual indicator such as the mouse cursor changing ... or whatever.

The following is a possible LXDE workaround. Assuming the program such as Firefox is launched by a .desktop file, then you can change that to Exec a script (python script in this case) that puts up a splash notification for the duration of the program loading phase. My .desktop file now contains (note in particular the Exec line)

/usr/share/applications/firefox-with-splash.desktop

Code: Select all

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Firefox with splash
Name[bg]=Firefox ESR
Name[ca]=Firefox ESR
Name[cs]=Firefox ESR
Name[el]=Firefox ESR
Name[es]=Firefox ESR
Name[fa]=Firefox ESR
Name[fi]=Firefox ESR
Name[fr]=Firefox ESR
Name[hu]=Firefox ESR
Name[it]=Firefox ESR
Name[ja]=Firefox ESR
Name[ko]=Firefox ESR
Name[nb]=Firefox ESR
Name[nl]=Firefox ESR
Name[nn]=Firefox ESR
Name[no]=Firefox ESR
Name[pl]=Firefox ESR
Name[pt]=Firefox ESR
Name[pt_BR]=Firefox ESR
Name[ru]=Firefox ESR
Name[sk]=Firefox ESR
Name[sv]=Firefox ESR
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
Comment[bg]=Сърфиране в Мрежата
Comment[ca]=Navegueu per el web
Comment[cs]=Prohlížení stránek World Wide Webu
Comment[de]=Im Internet surfen
Comment[el]=Πε