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?

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.