Alright, but maybe take a look into something like Zenity. The task done by your tool doesn’t really justify installing a huge JRE, when a simple bash script would suffice.

Why do you need cross platform availability, if .desktop files are (mostly) Linux only?

Ich kenne diese Band!

Rare to see people with common sense these days.

I use gnu stow (with --no-folding) and track my stow directory in a Git repo. This allows you to easily swap out distro specific differences, like the location of git_prompt.sh or aliases that map to different package managers. Also, you can switch between different window managers or desktop environments with a simple unstow and stow of .xinitrc files.

I’ve tried a lot and settled with vim-fugitive. If you know and like Vim-keybindings it’s probably the best choice out there.