How can a user determine the path to an application being showed in launcher?
This is meant for non-programmers or experts, so terminal commands are not really suited for them. Why: we need to make our users able to drag files/folders on our applications, a standard OS feature entirely missing in Ubuntu.
Go to /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications, right-click the application icon and click on "Properties".
I do not see a reason why a person who can't run a command in terminal would need a path.
In 18.04 and later launch an application by clicking on its icon in the Dash which is accessed by clicking the 9 dots icon in the lower left corner of the dock. Launch the System Monitor and make a note of the exact spelling of the name of the application that you just opened. Open the terminal and type:
type application-name
It takes only a few seconds to get the path to an application in Ubuntu 14.04 and later. Search for the application in the Dash and then drag the application's icon into the terminal. The application's full path will be shown in the terminal automatically. Dragging the icon into the terminal will also show the path to any file, folder, archive or anything else that has an icon.
In Ubuntu 20.04 and later drag and drop of files or directories doesn't work from the desktop, but does work in other locations including dragging from the desktop in Files file manager.
You have to go to a terminal, I fear... Here's an example:
whereis gedit
which gives as output:
gedit: /usr/bin/gedit /usr/share/gedit /usr/share/man/man1/gedit.1.gz
where the /bin/ path is where the executable file is, the /share/ one is a folder containing some accessory file to the application and the /man/ one is the manual of gedit.
I hope this answers your question
