How do you change application exec strings in Unity?

Question

I've got a few programs that need to have --no-sandbox appended to their execution in the application drawer. How do I do this?

Answer 1

To change the Exec= line of an application:

1. Copy the .desktop launcher that needs to be changed to ~/.local/share/applications if the change is to affect your user only, or to /usr/local/share/applications if the change is to affect all users.
2. Open the copy, and add the desired flag to the command specified on the line that starts with Exec=

Note:

• You need to have root permissions if you work in /usr/local/share/applications.
• To help you find the relevant desktop file, you can use the command find / -name '*.desktop' -exec grep -H "$1" {} \; 2>/dev/null, where you should replace the $1 with, for example, Name=Terminal if you want to find .desktop launchers that cause "Terminal" to be displayed in the application menu.
• If you find multiple files, then the one appearing in the first applications subdirectory of any of the directories listed in the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable will be the one that takes effect. You can see the contents of that variable with the command printenv XDG_DATA_DIRS