Python - Creating shortcuts

I was recently working on the mu project (a Python IDE for beginners), which is super easy to install using pip, but there is no way to automate the creation of desktop and menu shortcuts.

This seemed like a really big miss, shortcuts are the usual way for people (and certainly beginners to launch applications).

So I set to creating a really simple way of creating shortcuts for Python applications.

Enter shortcut, a X platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi) Python module for automatically creating shortcuts.

Its really simple to install and use:

pip3 install shortcut
shortcut name_of_app

It will find the location of the app and create desktop and menu shortcuts for it.

There is also a Python API which can be used to do the same:

from shortcut import ShortCutter
s = ShortCutter()
s.create_desktop_shortcut("python")
s.create_menu_shortcut("python")

You will find documentation at shortcut.readthedocs.io and code at github.com/martinohanlon/shortcut.