Adding custom applications to GNOME launcher

You can use Main Menu for this. If not, install it first:

sudo apt-get install alacarte

1. Open Main Menu

2. See the example

After that you can call your applications with name: "command_of_application".

Edit: I missed that you had asked for applications in your home directory. If so, command must be the full path of that application.

The applications launchers Gnome knows about are .desktop files in /usr/share/applications, and ~/.local/share/applications. You can create custom launchers for whatever is in your home folder, by either manually creating and editing a custom .desktop file, or by using Alacarte, the old Gnome menu editor.

The Gnome desktop file documentation can be of help: https://developer.gnome.org/integration-guide/stable/desktop-files.html.en

The custom launcher is just a text file, named, for example, EclipseEE.desktop, with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Eclipse EE
Exec=/home/mrPeterson/path_to_executable
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/optional/path/to/icon.png

(Repost from the original OP)

This is neat trick pointed out elsewhere:

gnome-desktop-item-edit ~/Desktop/ --create-new

Now, I have an Icon. That was a nice feature to have bound to the context menu, but alas, I do not see it.