Well it's simple, really, and the entire IT world is guilty of shitting billions of metric tons of what is factually pompous academic garbage wording, bordering on spam, in place of propper user manual They call that the documentation 99% of the time it succeeds at turning something simple into something barely understandable by the masses They can't explain shit without losing the reader with technical crap details ... In short` .bash_aliases` is a file where you store pre typed terminal/console commands, that you can then call with a keyword instead of typing them entirely, hence, the alias part in .bash_aliases Ok, here's how it works (this is for debian/ubuntu, and linux in general): 1) You open your text editor (something simple like gedit or notepad like) 2) You create a new file with it (save as) and you save it as ".bash_aliases", without quotes, in your home folder The fact that its name starts with "." makes it invisible to "you". To see it, open your home folder and press control+h to toggle visibility of invisible files on or off 3) Return to your text editor, and in your newly created file (called .bash_aliases), you paste this `alias www='chromium --incognito zerohedge.com & exit' ` Now, launch a terminal (control+alt+t) and type "www", without quotes It's going to launch chromium browser in incognito mode and go straight to zerohedge.com, every time you just type "www" in your terminal and hit enter You can of course add more aliases, like this: alias www='chromium --incognito zerohedge.com & exit' alias als='gedit ~/.bash_aliases & exit' alias x='cmatrix' But every time you ake a change to your .bash_aliases file, you NEED to reload your terminal, by relaunching it, because everytime a terminal is launched the content of the .bash_aliases file is loaded with it... So if you changed it... You need to reload it, logic Technical details: the "~" character in` 'gedit ~/.bash_aliases & exit'` symbolize your home folder. You could write it like that 'gedit /home/user1/.bash_aliases & exit', it's the same thing. Except you don't need to retype /home/user1/. "user1" being the home folder name, replace with yours, of course... And the "& exit" means quit the terminal right after the launch of the program in your command If you use && instead of &, it's going to wait until you quit the said program, before closing the terminal ... But really it's very simple and very handy lol When you do it When you explain it, it gets that compicated, for a shitty text file with aliases in it... ... And next thing I know you tell me you're on windows