Set Alacritty as Default Terminal Editor (Ubuntu)

set-alacritty-default.sh

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator x-terminal-emulator $(which alacritty) 50
sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

I have alacritty installed with snap which made the setup process more difficult since to start alacritty you have to use the snap run alacrtty command. ( which alacritty will give /snap/bin/alacritty but that is just a symlink to the snap binary )

I created the following script in /usr/bin/start-alacritty :

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/snap run alacritty

And set/copied the permissions accordingly:

sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/start-alacritty
sudo chmod --reference=/usr/bin/ls /usr/bin/start-alacritty

Followed by the commands from above:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator x-terminal-emulator /usr/bin/start-alacritty 50
sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

Now ctrl+alt+t in Gnome finally launches the right terminal.

Hope this helps anyone who also "accidentally" installed alacritty through snap 😄. Thanks for sharing this tho, it gave me a good starting point.

@K1ngjulien Thank you, this helped me a lot! 🥇 👍

yes very nice @K1ngjulien !! thx a bunch

thank you. Now how to set it back to default ?

Thanks for this.

What does the 50 at the end do?

Also, consider using $(which alacritty) rather than hard coding /usr/bin/alacritty. For me alacritty was installed somewhere else.

From the man page, this is the "priority" which is used for the following purpose - "when a link group is in automatic mode, the alternatives system ensures that the links in the group point to the highest priority alternative appropriate for the group." In other words if a decision needs to be made as to which link is used, the numerically higher value wins out.

Good suggestion - I updated the script to use $(which alacritty) 👍