How to categorize Steam games on Linux with Steamycats

As more and more games come to Steam for the Linux platform, user libraries get bigger and more congested. To fix the library congestion, Steam Cats was created. With the app, it’s possible to connect to your Steam account and categorize Steam games in your library by category, genre, community tags and more.

Steamy Cats is a bash script hosted on GitHub, so it’ll run on nearly every Linux distribution out there. To use it, you will need the latest release of Steam for Linux, and the Git tool.

Got a big games’ library? You might want to back it up.

Install Steam and Git

There are many ways to install the Steam application on Linux. As of now, all major Linux operating systems have a package available.

Note: the Steamycats game sorting script currently doesn’t support the Flatpak release of Steam. If you can’t get Steam working on your distribution, consider installing Ubuntu or SteamOS.

To start the installation, open up a terminal window, press Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Then, follow the installation instructions that correspond to your Linux distribution.

Ubuntu

sudo apt install git steam jq

Debian

sudo apt-get install git jq
wget https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/client/installer/steam.deb
sudo dpkg -i steam.deb
sudo apt install -f

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S git steam jq

Fedora

Get Steam on Fedora by enabling the Non-free RPMFusion.

Note: replace the X with the release number of Fedora Linux you use.

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-X.noarch.rpm -y

sudo dnf install steam git jq-y

OpenSUSE

sudo zypper install git steam jq

Download Steam Cats

With Steam and Git installed and ready to go, it’s time to grab the latest release of the Steamy Cats script. To do this, launch a terminal window and use the git clone command.

git clone https://github.com/bryanmr/Steamy_Cats.git

Once the clone command finishes up, everything will save into the “Steamy_Cats” folder. You can then move the terminal session into the “Steamy_Cats” folder with the CD command.

cd Steamy_Cats

From here, update the script’s permissions so that your Linux PC will correctly execute it using the chmod command.

sudo chmod +x Steamy_Cats

Categorize Steam games

Run the Steamcats sorting script for the first time by opening up a terminal window, and, with standard privileges (no root or sudo) run the script.

Note: do not attempt to execute the file with the sh command. The coding in the script file doesn’t seem to respect this launch command very well.

./Steamy_Cats

Upon running the script, you should see some information on-screen. If you don’t, it’s because Steam has yet to run on your computer successfully. Open up your Steam client, sign in to your account and try the above command again.

Once the script is run correctly, it’ll detect your Steam profile based on the configuration files on your Linux PC. From here, it’ll scan your profile and discover the video games currently attached to your account, in your library. Just sit back, as the downloading process will likely take quite a bit of time, especially if you have a massive amount of video games to sort through.

When the Steamycats script is done downloading your game files, it will quickly parse through everything and set up categories for all of your video games in your Steam library in a configuration file on your hard drive.

This configuration file isn’t applied automatically though and must be applied manually. To apply everything, close your Steam client. The configuration swap can’t happen with it open.

To close Steam, find the “Steam” menu icon, then click on “exit.” Or, find the Steam icon in the system tray, right-click on it and select the “exit.”

Apply new categories

Steamycats automatically prints out a command in the terminal so that you can apply the custom categories to your Steam profile. The command output should look something like the example below.

cp /var/tmp/newconfig.vdf /home/username/.steam/steam/userdata/123456789/7/remote/sharedconfig.vdf

Look through the output of the Steamcats script in the terminal prompt for the line that says “New config written,” highlight the cp command that looks like the example above, and save the line to your clipboard.

With the line saved to your Linux PC’s clipboard, go to the terminal and press the Ctrl + Shift + V keyboard combination to paste it in. Then, press the Enter key to apply the new changes instantly.

Access the new game categories

When the new game categories are applied to your Steam account, you can access it by opening up the Steam client and clicking on “Library.”

On the Library page, look through, and you’ll see dozens of different categories for your games, including ones based on release dates, genre, popular tags, and even compatibility with Steam Play, the new Linux/Windows game runtime system.