Bug#295829: solution

[Matthew Newton]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 06:02:41PM +0000, Stewart Jeacocke wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 14:52 +0000, Matthew Newton wrote:
> > This only changes the text editor for that type of file. Many different
> > types of file open with a text editor, and it should be possible to
> > change the system default for all of them.
> 
> I think upstream bug 155612 [1] will shed some light on this (I can't
> check at the moment because the gnome bugzilla is down). There used to
> be a Text Editor tab in preferred applications but it was apparently
> decided that it was confusing so it has been removed. I'm not going to
> re-open this bug since it would appear that upstream do not want to
> implement it. 

OK, just for the record, I've found a good way of doing this.

  Right-click on a text file, choose "Open with Other Application...".

  Type in favourite editor (I use /usr/bin/gvim) and click Open.

  Get a terminal, and cd to ~/.local/share/applications. There is now a
  new file in there called "gvim.desktop"

  Create a new file called "defaults.list" with the following info:
  (this is equivalent to the system-wide defaults.list file in
  /usr/share/gnome/applications)

---8<---
[Default Applications]
text/plain=gvim.desktop
---8<---

  Restart nautilus with "killall nautilus"

This should change the default text editor used for all text-editing
stuff.

Thanks for your help with this, Stewart. The pointers to the GNOME
bugzilla sent me in the right direction :-). (Still think that the GNOME
people should make this easier to do, it's not an uncommon thing!)

Matthew


-- 
Matthew Newton <mcn4@le.ac.uk>

UNIX and e-mail Systems Administrator, Network Support Section,
Computer Centre, University of Leicester,
Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdom