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I'm taking the example of the so-called "Videos" packages while it is in fact called totem in usr/bin/totem.

But there are dozens of others, e.g. "Terminal" which is really called gnome-terminal, etc...

This is extremely misleading and, I'm sure, has made thousands of people lose hours because of this.

Where is this "name symbolic link" made, and is it possible to remove it ? If so, how ?

Atralb
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    Have wondered about this for sometime also. Other examples are nautilus and files,seahorse and 'passwords and keys'. Nautilus and seahorse are found more on the forums than on Ubuntu operating system. Makes it hard to know exactly what people are talking about. – crip659 Jan 14 '20 at 21:02
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    @crip659 these aliases are meant for people who come to Ubuntu from Windows and Mac background, specifically those who are computer users, but not developers, or Linux nerds. These people don't know they should look for a totem to play a video or find a seahorse to store a password. – user68186 Jan 14 '20 at 21:10
  • You won't have to lose hours to find the command associated to an application if you know the right place to look at: https://askubuntu.com/q/126268/480481 – pomsky Jan 14 '20 at 21:11

2 Answers2

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This is done because:

  • Videos is much easier for users to remember, instead of /usr/bin/totem.
  • Terminal is much easier for users to remember, instead of /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.

Videos and Terminal are closer to the actual functionality of those applications.

Also, when searching for applications via the Super key, if you enter the search string "videos", you may actually come up with multiple hits, depending on what applications you have installed. You wouldn't normally search for "totem" (although that would work).

Update #1:

To see where the names actually get changed... we look at a partial snippet...

Note: the "Name=", and "Exec=", and "Icon=" lines...

cat /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Totem.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Videos
Comment=Play movies
# Translators: Search terms to find this application. Do NOT translate or locali
ze the semicolons! The list MUST also end with a semicolon! Do NOT translate or 
remove the application name from the list! It is used for search.
Keywords=Video;Movie;Film;Clip;Series;Player;DVD;TV;Disc;Totem;
Exec=totem %U
# Translators: Do NOT translate or transliterate this text (this is an icon file
 name)!
Icon=org.gnome.Totem
heynnema
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  • Nautilus file manager is the name for the files manager in Ubuntu, but if I open up files, the only name listed in title is files. Do not think I have ever seen the name nautilus except on forums. – crip659 Jan 14 '20 at 21:11
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    @user68186 file manager Nemo uninstalled :-) – heynnema Jan 14 '20 at 22:41
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Ok, thanks for the help some provided in the comments.

So I found 2 methods for knowing the actual command of a Gonme/Ubuntu app :

1) As @pomsky indicated you can do that in GUI with Nautilus :

  • Open nautilus ("Files" in Gnome menu)
  • Navigate to /usr/share/applications
  • Right click on the app of your choice and select Properties
  • The actual terminal command is shown in the "Command" field

2) More tricky, you will need to reverse find the name of the app in the list of all commands that are aliased.

  • Open a Terminal
  • grep -l Pattern /usr/share/applications will output any file that contains the Pattern, which needs to be the App you are searching for.
  • grep Exec File, where File is (one of) the file you got on last step.
  • You can now see the actual command run by the system when you launch an App in the menu !

E.g : 

$ grep -l Videos /usr/share/applications

org.gnome.Totem.desktop
totem.desktop

$ grep Exec totem.desktop

Exec=totem %U
Exec=totem --play-pause
Exec=totem --next
Exec=totem --previous
Exec=totem --mute
Exec=totem --fullscreen

I can now see that the actual command launched by "Videos" is totem :).

PS : Verified on Ubuntu 18.04

Atralb
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  • This doesn't work for Totem. I didn't try the other examples. – heynnema Jan 14 '20 at 21:55
  • @heynnema Hum I just done it successfully 30 sec ago, and I'm on Ubuntu 18.04. Did you follow the exact instructions ? If so, you will have to further inform us on your issue. – Atralb Jan 14 '20 at 21:56
  • It's different in 19.10... probably because Nautllus is different in 19.xx. – heynnema Jan 14 '20 at 21:59
  • @pomsky bad choice of my words... in 19.10... if I follow the instructions exactly, and I choose "Properties", it doesn't show the command field. They changed Nautilus in later versions of Ubuntu. – heynnema Jan 14 '20 at 22:01
  • @pomsky see https://imgur.com/sADpOuC ... and yes, if I actually open the desktop file with an editor, I would probably see the Exec= line. But that's way off of the beaten path. – heynnema Jan 14 '20 at 22:13
  • @heynnema Even the icons are also blank (they used to show the associated application icon in older versions). Probably it is because Nautilus lost the ability to run executables directly. Anyway the fundamentals are still the same, the Exec= entry in the .desktop file would show the command for the application. – pomsky Jan 14 '20 at 22:33
  • @Atralb ok, we figured it out. If you see my imgur link, you'll see what it looks like in 19.10... and it's all because Nautilus is different in 19.xx. You may wish to add that note in your answer :-) – heynnema Jan 14 '20 at 22:43
  • @heynnema hey dude, I took a bit of time looking how to do it in an elegant way, but here it is :), I added the second method ! – Atralb Jan 15 '20 at 00:48