Recently I started experimenting with Flatpak. Mainly trying to use it for day-to-day apps like Slack or Skype.

Flatpak applications are usually started by launching:

flatpak run com.skype.Client

You can see that this can quickly get pretty messy.

Flatpak does provide the “.desktop” file for each of the application, and if you’re using desktop environment conforming to those standards, application will be listed in your application menu. If you’re on the other hand not using such environment, and like me, use some random WM or just prefer launching applications via command line we can make this a bit easier.

Flatpak usefully exports all application launchers within single directory called /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin. In order to be able to autocomplete the program names just add that to your $PATH

export PATH="$PATH:/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin"