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Somewhat of a novice here. I recently installed the flatpak Brave browser and since it's tedious to write flatpak run com.brave.Browser every time to run it from the terminal, I tried to create an alias using alias brave-browser="flatpak run com.brave.Browser". This works just fine for the instance, but when I open up a new terminal and type in the alias I get: brave-browser: command not found. This also happens with every other application I tried this with. What am I missing?

Uncle Woods
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When you create an alias it will only function within that terminal. You need to edit your .bashrc file which is in your home directory - add the alias to that file and it will be available on an ongoing basis (you'll need the terminal to 'read' the .bashrc file once you've edited the file - either close the terminal and open another (which will read the file), or type . .bashrc to force bash to read it.

There are a number of simple text editors - I use nano as it's very simple.

Make a copy of .bashrc in case you mess it up (eg cp .bashrc .bashrc-backup)

Then type nano .bashrc

You can then find a bit of the file with some aliases and add yours as a new line under some of the others (you can put it anywhere within the file but for human readability / order it is sensible to place it near other aliases).

Then save the file ('write out') by Ctrl + o Then exit with Ctrl + x

If you mess it up, delete the damaged version (rm .bashrc) and restore it from your backup: you do that by 'moving' the file from its current location to the same location with a new name (mv .bashrc-backup .bashrc)

Of course, if you have a preferred text editor use that instead.

Will
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  • Thanks for the help, it works now! – Uncle Woods Jun 28 '22 at 13:26
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    As a small tip, nano will also save directly (without prompt) with Ctrl+S. So Ctrl+S Ctrl+X is the quick way to exit while saving the file. This is the perfect answer for the question as asked, but for flatpaks, I would rather install a symbolic link in /usr/local/bin that points to /var/lib/flatpak/exports/com.brave.Browser – vanadium Jun 28 '22 at 15:35