website/content/blog/snap-flatpak-aliases.md

title	date	draft	tags	math
Aliases for Snaps and Flatpaks	2022-02-04T20:29:04-05:00	false		false

Sometimes snap packages and flatpaks come with unmemorable names to run their commands. Luckily for snap packages, you can easily alias them. For example, to rename the .NET executable to dotnet run.

sudo snap alias dotnet-sdk.dotnet dotnet

Sadly the same cannot be said for Flatpaks. There is a Github issue open at the moment. I'll update this post when they successfully close the issue. In the meantime, we can use a script made by Seth Kenlon over at Red Hat's blog. The script is at the bottom of the post for posterity. You can save it to ~/.local/bin, chmod +x ~/.local/bin, and then run fuzzpak [appname] where appname is the last part of the flatpak name. For example, the packageio.typora.Typora can be called with fuzzpak typora.

# parse opts
while [ True ]; do
if [ "$1" = "--help" -o "$1" = "-h" ]; then
    echo " "
    echo "$0 [OPTIONS]"
    echo "--directory, -d   Location of flatpaks (default: $HOME/.var/app"
    echo " "
    exit
elif [ "$1" = "--directory" -o "$1" = "-d" ]; then
    DIR=$DIR
    shift 2
else
    break
fi
done

# main
launch_app "${1}"