I'm so confused.

I'm trying to autostart parcellite. I found these instructions:
To get it autostarted at login, just copy the .desktop file from /usr/share/applications to ~/.config/autostart,
but when I go to that directory, I don't have a parcellite.desktop file. There is only one .desktop file there (abiword). I tried as a regular user, as super-user, and with hidden files visible, but I can't see the .desktop files (except that one) however if I right-click the panel and click application launch bar settings and then add, I see a whole list of .desktop files, including the parcellite one. So why can't I see it in pcman, and how can I copy the file if I can't get to it?