Adding Vicinae to GNOME

A quick guide just I don’t forget how to set up

The new girl on the block for Spotlight-like behavior in Linux (and coming soon to macOS and Windows) is Vicinae. The application promises speed and flexibility, which is something many launchers promise but fail to deliver, plus Raycast extensions compatibility. At time of writing, I’m still testing it to see it should be my first launcher or not.

Installing it on GNOME is not straightforward, especially if your Linux distribution is atomic (immutable filesystem).

The way to install Vicinae requires three steps: adding a Vicinae as an AppImage using GearLever, installing the GNOME Extension, making it launch at startup, and adding a shortcut to open the launcher.

GearLever and AppImages

AppImages are somewhat applications that can run anywhere since these pack all its dependencies in exchange of a larger size. Vicinae can be downloaded as so through their GitHub Repository.

GearLever is an App to manage AppImages, and it’s great on GNOME since it can handle also “registering” the app in the GNOME Launcher. You can open the Vicinae AppImage through GearLever and move it to a directory.