How do I refresh Gnome 3 applications

You can restart the gnome-shell by pressing Alt+F2 and then typing in either "restart" or just "r" and pressing Enter.

Otherwise I've noticed that it automatically refreshes .desktop files after waiting a little while.

Cross-posting this from the Ubuntu question site.

You need to:

Note: hicolor is the default theme which app developers should use. if you're making an icon theme, refresh your icon theme's folder instead.

sudo touch /usr/share/icons/hicolor ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor
sudo gtk-update-icon-cache

See (the only documentation I can find for this): https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Scriptlets#Icon_Cache

From Desktop entries in Arch linux wiki, this works on later versions of Gnome:

update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

Related