Steamer

What's this and why?

Steamer finds your installed Steam games and creates shortcuts for them in your application menu. This is particularly useful if you're migrating from Windows to Linux and have a library of Steam games on a separate drives and want your nice start menu/application launcher shortcuts back.

Techy stuff

Steam stores the current Steam library paths in a file called libraryfolders.vdf. From that Steamer extracts the paths to the actual libraries, and checks for installed games in the steamapps folder which contains a list of *.acf files. These files contain metadata about each installed game, including its name, installation path, and app ID. Steamer reads these files to gather information about your installed games and then generates a .desktop for each one it finds (skipping tools such as Proton and the various Linux runtimes).

How to install

If you have Cargo installed, you can install Steamer by running:

cargo install steamer

How to use

Open Steam, add the desired Steam libraries in the settings. Navigate to the Library page to cache all the app icons which will be used. Then just run:

The default parameters have been tested on a non-flatpak install of Linux on Fedora, with libraries spanning 4 different drives, 3 of which are NTFS. Steamer also offers several ways to tweak the games that will be skipped:

% steamer -h
Usage: steamer [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -d, --dry-run
          Run without writing files to disk, only discovering applications
  -s, --steam-path <STEAM_PATH>
          Path to Steam installation (defaults to ~/.local/share/Steam)
  -a, --app-dir <APP_DIR>
          Path to applications directory (defaults to ~/.local/share/applications)
  -k, --skip-keywords <SKIP_KEYWORDS>
          Comma separated list of keywords to skip (defaults to Proton,Steam Linux Runtime,Steamworks,Common Redistributables,SteamVR,Dedicated Server,Soundtrack)
  -i, --ignored-app-ids <IGNORED_APP_IDS>
          Comma separated list of app IDs to skip (defaults to 480)
  -h, --help
          Print help
  -V, --version
          Print version

How to build from source

1. Install Rust and Cargo.
2. Open a terminal in this folder.
3. Run the build command:

   cargo build --release

4. The executable file will be created at target/release/steamer.