HowTo Change Default GNOME Text Editor or Any Other Default Program

[AgenT]

How-To Change Default Text Editor (or any other default program)

The following step-by-step guide will make the program Scribes open every plain text document instead of Gedit. Instead of Scribes, you may use any other program.

Check if this file exists:

~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list

If so, open it, if not:

touch ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list

Open ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list and look for this entry:

[Default Applications]

If it does not exist, add it on top. Next, add the following below "[Default Applications]":

text/plain=scribes.desktop

Your completed entry should look like this:

[Default Applications]
text/plain=scribes.desktop

Now run:

pkill nautilus

It is possible to set any mime type and any program that has a *.desktop entry. Find out your favorite program's desktop entry by looking in this folder:

/usr/share/applications/

You need to know what mime type you want to have your new program open. text/plain means opening up any normal text file. If you would like Scribes to open ANY text file, you would substitute text/plain with text/* and follow everything else.

Why is this better than just right-click on file -> Open With? Because with the above, ALL plain text files will be opened by Scribes, not just ones that have a particular extension.

For more details on what programs are used for what mime types, see file:
/usr/share/applications/defaults.list
One easy way to replace a program like gedit would be to get all entries containing gedit, replace them with scribes, and add that list to ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list.

This quit one-liner does exactly that, except that it posts the results in terminal and you will just have to copy/paste it into your file:

 grep gedit /usr/share/applications/defaults.list | sed s/gedit/scribes/g

[edmnc]

Hey, thanks for this!

[DAE51D]

Could you please explain as to how to make Geany the default editor for just PHP files (NOT text files)? Currently it is defaulted to "Gedit".

I can't figure out what the mimetype should be?
Here is what I have currently, but they don't work:

$ cat ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list
[Default Applications]
application/x-httpd-php=geany.desktop
application/x-php=geany.desktop
text/x-php=geany.desktop

$ grep php /usr/share/applications/defaults.list
$

$ grep gedit /usr/share/applications/defaults.list
application/x-perl=gedit.desktop
text/plain=gedit.desktop
text/x-chdr=gedit.desktop
text/x-csrc=gedit.desktop
text/x-dtd=gedit.desktop
text/x-java=gedit.desktop
text/mathml=gedit.desktop
text/x-python=gedit.desktop
text/x-sql=gedit.desktop

it doesn't list PHP there at all

[traffas]

I, too, would be very interested in making Geany the default program to handle PHP files.

[Tominator]

I want Gmail to be my default as opposed to Evolution. I followed your instruction and:


Code:

grep gedit /usr/share/applications/defaults.list | sed s/gedit/scribes/g

I got the following:

application/x-perl=Evolution.desktop
text/plain=Evolution.desktop
text/x-chdr=Evolution.desktop
text/x-csrc=Evolution.desktop
text/x-dtd=Evolution.desktop
text/x-java=Evolution.desktop
text/mathml=Evolution.desktop
text/x-python=Evolution.desktop
text/x-sql=Evolution.desktop

I tried:


Code:

/usr/share/applications/

and got:

bash: /usr/share/applications/: is a directory

no help there, would the substition of Gmail for Evolution on my list work?

[Mindless Automaton]

How-To Change Default Text Editor (or any other default program)

The following step-by-step guide will make the program Scribes open every plain text document instead of Gedit. Instead of Scribes, you may use any other program.

How about something like:

Navigate to /usr/share/applications in Nautilis.
Scroll down to Text Editor.
Right-click Text Editor, select Properties.
Change the command line to your application. (in my case, medit)

EnjoY!

Mindless Automaton

[Mindless Automaton]

I, too, would be very interested in making Geany the default program to handle PHP files.

Does this do what you would like?

In Nautilus, find a php file.
Right-click the php file and select properties.
Select the Open With tab.
Left-click Add button.
Find Geany or set custom command to launch Geany.

Thanks!

Mindless Automaton

[sylwester]

So far all of above changes the behaviour for one user. I wanted to set smplayer as system wide multimedia player instead of totem. I did this to get the desired effect:

sudo perl -pi.old -e 's/^([^=]+)=totem\.desktop/$1=smplayer.desktop/' /usr/share/applications/defaults.list

To only change for video files one can do this:

sudo perl -pi.old -e 's/^(video[^=]+)=totem\.desktop/$1=smplayer.desktop/' /usr/share/applications/defaults.list

make sure the file smplayer.desktop (or watherver you use or change from/to) exists under /usr/share/applications/.

[Johannes Eva]

How-To Change Default Text Editor (or any other default program)

There is another way to do this. It is a somewhat clumsy way but it works. As it needs a longer explanation, I have written an article about this:

How to change file associations on Ubuntu

(Tested with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat)

[nikosft]

For Ubuntu 10.10 I found this simple solution to make geany your default text editor.

-In GNome menu Right Click and press Edit Menus
-Go to Accessories, Text Editor and press properties
-Change the command tou geany

Now all documents open with geany instead of gedit

Nikos