#Default folder x alternatives manual
#Default folder x alternatives download

Manually creating a symlink might seem tempting, but that's not resistant to updates from a package manager, nor is it centralized. The easy solution to this situation, and many other examples similar to it, is to designate the new nem binary as the preferred alternative to the em binary when the em command is used. You find a Unicode-enabled fork of em called nem, but you know that 99% of your users are used to em, have scripts that call em, and will continue to think of any replacement application as em no matter what you do. However, your userbase has made it clear to you recently that they can't survive any longer without emoji support in their terminal editors and em doesn't support Unicode. It's been the go-to editor for your userbase for years, many people have based workflows around it and some maintain highly customized configs for it. When to use the alternatives commandĪ simple and realistic example: you have a command on your system called em, which launches a simple text editor. Red Hat rewrote the command without Perl, and it's been propagated throughout Fedora-based distributions such as Red Hat and CentOS, as well as other distributions that look to Red Hat for the functional definition of the Linux Standard Base (LSB). Originally, this was a convenience utility, written in Perl, from the Debian Linux project, called update-alternatives. The alternatives command began its life as, interestingly, an alternative. Unless that is, you use the alternatives command. In theory, a Linux sysadmin can offer many system tools according to function rather than by the exact name of the executable, but that often requires a lot of symlinking and version tracking. In fact, even applications don't always care how something is achieved as long as all of its system calls are answered correctly. How well do you know Linux? Take a quiz and get a badgeĪbstractions can be helpful to users because many users don't care how their computer achieves a task as long as it's on target.Linux system administration skills assessment.A guide to installing applications on Linux.

#Default folder x alternatives download

Download RHEL 9 at no charge through the Red Hat Developer program.

Update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/gnome-terminal. Press to keep the current choice, or type selection number: 1 In my case, I want to use the GNOME terminal instead of the one from Regolith desktop. Press to keep the current choice, or type selection number:Īll you have to do is to enter the selection number.

#Default folder x alternatives manual

There are 2 choices for the alternative x-terminal-emulator (providing /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator).Ġ /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.wrapper 40 auto modeġ /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.wrapper 40 manual mode :~$ sudo update-alternatives -config x-terminal-emulator The current default terminal is marked with the asterisk. It will show all the terminal emulators present on your system that can be used as default. To do that, run the following command: sudo update-alternatives -config x-terminal-emulator You can use it to change the default command line text editor, terminal and more.

On Debian-based distributions, there is a handy command line utility called update-alternatives that allows you to handle the default applications.