How to rename gnome-shell launcher application name without Alacarte?

Question

Pity that gnome-shell's launcher shows only a few characters of the application's name. That's why I'd like to rename e.g. "web-browser firefox" into just "firefox".

Previous versions of gnome had a working Alacarte program which allowed to do what I need.
Now Alacarte shows this error while trying to enter the applications preferences:

File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 391, in on_edit_properties_activate
    process = subprocess.Popen(['gnome-desktop-item-edit', file_path], env=os.environ)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 679, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1249, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception

How do I rename an application without alacarte?

Answer 1

In Ubuntu, apps are described in .desktop files

Gnome Shell, Unity, KDE Plasma, etc use those files to obtain application name.

They do so by looking up on Name parameter in .desktop file.

Most .desktop files are located in /usr/share/applications

So to change an application's display name :

1. Open gedit and open /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop from gedit // maybe it is firefox-broswer.desktop (not using ubuntu at the moment)
2. Locate the Name=Firefox Web Browser line and change it to Name=Firefox
3. Save the file and reload your shell

NOTE: You must open gedit as root :

gksu gedit

Answer 2

They are either in the system-wide folder:

/usr/share/applications/

or in your user local folder (replace "~" with /home/USERNAME):

~/.local/share/applications

in Files, you can hit Ctrl+L to have an editable location bar, and browse to the location.