Why doesn't the desktop run .bashrc?
Actually it does in some distros, at least in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and (Open)SUSE Linux. But in certain distros it doesn't. For instance in the version of Ubuntu I have here, .bashrc doesn't seem to get sourced at login time (I just found out today).
The reason against sourcing .bashrc at login time for the whole desktop environment may be that .bashrc, in the most strict sense, is a resouce file for
bash shell environment, and the graphical desktop environment does not depend on bash, nor is it a child process of bash. It is also possible that the user may be using a different shell, such as tcsh or zsh. In that view, it may not make sense to source .bashrc. for a process that has no relation to bash. But in reality many distros do it, and that's probably done for convenience (don't quote me on that, though :-).
What exactly happens at login time is also highly distribution & environment specific; that is, the desktop environment (DE) you choose (KDE, Gnome, etc.) and the login manager you use (xdm, gdm, or kdm) may influence what commands get run, what resource files get sourced, that sort of stuff.
What Linux distribution are you using, BTW?
Where should I set my path (and other stuff) so that slickEdit will have all the variables I want.
There are several ways to do this. But perhaps the easiest IMO is to write a wrapper script that sources your .bashrc and start vs afterwards, and have your launcher point to that wrapper script.
The following script will probably work:
#!/bin/bash
VSEXEC=/opt/slickedit/bin/vs # <- point this to your vs location
source ~/.bashrc
$VSEXEC $@
and make sure this script has an execute permission set, or it won't run. To set the execution bit on, run the following command:
chmod +x {script name}
Once this is done, go to the Properties of your launcher file (right-click) and change the command to point to this script, instead of the original
vs binary. That should do the trick.
Let us know how that goes. :-)
--Kohei