Aliases in Synapse

Question

Is there any way to add aliases / change items' priority in Synapse? For example, I want it to oper Firefox and not LibreOffice when I type ff <return>. Another example is that I want to open Final Term instead of plain Terminal or Terminator when I search for term, yet I still want both apps on my computer since Final Term is a bit shaky.

Answer 1

I would say you might not be able to do this directly, but you can simply add .desktop file in the /usr/share/applications/ directory and use the alias as your name for the app. For instance, if you want to use ff for Firefox, add this file:

/usr/share/applications/ff.desktop

with this content:

[Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Name=ff Comment=FF shortcut to open Firefox Type=Application Encoding=UTF-8 Exec=/usr/bin/firefox Terminal=false

This should do the trick. For details about .desktop files, you can read the archlinux page about Desktop entries.

Also note that you could simply copy the existing Firefox .desktop and adjust it:

$ sudo cp /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop /usr/share/applications/ff.desktop

Then change the Name tag value to ff. Job done !