Make Alt + F2 accept shell aliases.

linuxmint / cinnamon

A Linux desktop featuring a traditional layout, built from modern technology and introducing brand new innovative features.

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Make Alt + F2 accept shell aliases. #3130

Closed gauravjuvekar closed 9 years ago

gauravjuvekar commented 10 years ago

Title says it all. Aliases set in ~/.bashrc are ignored in the alt+f2 dialog.

VolMi commented 10 years ago

That is not a Bug. ~/.bashrc is for bash. But maybe it's still worthwhile to include it as a feature in the next release. I'd relable it as a [Request].

aarossig commented 10 years ago

I could see this one being a bit difficult to implement.

There are a variety of shells of varying popularity: bash, zsh, csh. People are free to use a different shell depending on their taste or needs.

Here is a nice work around to alias milkytracker as mk (just an example, it doesn't necessarily make sense to do this).

andrew@silkscreen /usr/bin $ sudo ln -s milkytracker mk

When I use the Alt+F2 utility, I can now launch milkytracker using the alias 'mk'.

Launching MilkyTracker

milkytracker

You may even be able to make a folder full of these aliases in your home directory and add them to your path. This I have not tried.

If someone can provide a nice way to integrate with all of the shells, that would be great. Otherwise it seems beyond the scope of the Alt+F2 utility.

Thoughts?

dalcde commented 9 years ago

You can currenlty define user aliases for Alt-F2. These have to be defined explicitly for Alt-F2 instead of using shell aliases because

Alt-F2 is not a shell (and definitely not the shell you are using), so it is logically incorrect to use shell aliases
You can have many shells with different sets of aliases
The set of aliases you would want in your shell is likely to be different from what you want in Alt-F2, since shell aliases are usually for command line programs (eg. ls, grep, ssh), while Alt-F2 will correspond to desktop applications.

gauravjuvekar commented 9 years ago

@dalcde

You can currenlty define user aliases for Alt-F2. These have to be defined explicitly for Alt-F2 instead of using shell aliases because

How?

JosephMcc commented 9 years ago

@gauravjuvekar It's available in git master and you can do it by setting the aliases in the org.cinnamon.run-dialog-aliases gsettings key. Still need to add a way to do this in the cinnamon settings ui.