How to edit the aliases with which a program in Ubuntu is associated (and therefore will be returned in the search menu)

Pardon for for not having the correct terminology yet.

When I press the Meta button, Ubuntu lets me search for programs. When I, e.g., search for 'sound' it shows me a list of settings, programs, etc.

One of the programs listed is "audacity". Therefore, do I understand correctly that the program 'audacity' has an alias 'sound'.

Is there a way to lookup which aliases a program has defined, and can I edit this?

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2 Answers

Keywords (aliases, tags) are in the application's .desktop file.

For example, Audacity's is /usr/share/applications/audacity.desktop

And the specific line within that file is: Keywords=audio;sound;alsa;jack;editor;

It is possible for you to edit the file (it's an ordinary text file) using sudo (it's owned by root). However, the next update of the package will overwrite your edits.

It is also possible for you to keep a custom .desktop file in your /home/<your_username>/.local/share/applications directory. However, this won't be automatically retained if you reinstall Ubuntu or migrate to a different system. It's up to the user to manage, maintain, and backup/restore custom files.

If there is a good keyword missing, please file a bug report and/or contribute a patch to the Debian packagers. Ubuntu improvements depend upon community contributions like this.

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Notice that in the /usr/share/applications/audacity.desktop file, next to the keywords, the aliases are also defined by the GenericName line. Since this is 'sound editor' for Audacity, Audacity would still pop-up after deleting the 'sound' under the keywords line.

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