Running appimages with a stable command (stable path)

[ColinMaudry]

Pre-submit checks

• [X] I checked for similar issues beforehand, but could not find any. I could not add my proposal to any existing issue.
• [X] I am going to take the time to to fill in all the required details. I know that the bug report will be dismissed otherwise.

Feature description

AIL changes the names of the appimage files everytime they are updated. One consequence is that it is not possible to reliably have an appimage running at startup, for instance by adding a command in the Startup Applications program in Ubuntu. It's also impossible to reliably run an appimage from a script.

AIL also seems to change the name of the .desktop files, these cannot be target either.

Could it be possible to have, for each appimage, a stable path that can be executed?

Proposed solution

Simlinks could be used as proxies to the appimages. These simlinks would be updated when the app is updates, but the name of the simlink would be stable.

Alternative solutions you considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[TheAssassin]

Interesting idea. We could use some version comparison/sorting in combination with a stable identifier such as the AppStream-introduced reverse domain names (or some to-be-invented static key).

I currently do it in a similar fashion with shell scripts, but this could and should be a feature in AppImageLauncher.

[webmasterMeyers]

I also need this, so that when using URL's from web dev enviroments like vscode:/path/to/file the program will open with the file.

[eliliam]

I am looking for a way to address this as well. Take Cursor for example, currently I have an alias set up which points at Cursor*.AppImage in my AppImages folder. This seems to work fairly well, but having a known constant path to the AppImage would be far cleaner and allow better scripting as well.

My alias for Cursor:

alias cursor="~/AppImages/Cursor*.AppImage" 

This lets you launch Cursor just by running the cursor alias in the shell.