Bug#879157: vim-common: Set NoDisplay=true for vim.desktop

[Josh Triplett]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 05:25:56PM -0400, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> Package: vim-common
> Version: 2:8.0.1144-1
> X-Debbugs-Cc:josh at joshtriplett.org
> Tags: patch
> 
> vim.desktop was added to Debian so that text files could easily be
> opened with vim. [1]
> 
> However, this also made Vim show up in the applications menu which
> seems very odd for a terminal "app". It might not have been noticed by
> GNOME users on Debian since the Debian GNOME team has blacklisted
> vim.desktop from showing in GNOME's Activities Overview. [2]
> 
> The Desktop Entry Spec says
> 
> "NoDisplay means "this application exists, but don't display it in the
> menus". This can be useful to e.g. associate this application with
> MIME types, so that it gets launched from a file manager (or other
> apps), without having a menu entry for it (there are tons of good
> reasons for this, including e.g. the netscape -remote, or kfmclient
> openURL kind of stuff)." [3]
> 
> Therefore, I think it would be very appropriate for vim.desktop to set
> NoDisplay=true. I confirmed that this hides Vim from the Activities
> Overview but it still shows up in the Open With dialog in GNOME.
> 
> Note that I am not proposing setting NoDisplay=true for gvim which is
> closer to a traditional desktop app than vim.
> 
> I am attaching a patch in my next email to implement my proposal.
> 
> For completeness, I did propose this upstream and it was rejected (but
> maybe I'll try again later). [4]

I don't think it's unreasonable to display vim in the menu. If you have
both vim and gvim installed, it ought to be easy to tell the difference,
but I don't see a good argument for hiding vim.desktop.