Default applications

[Steve Cayford]

Erik Harrison wrote:
> On 8/24/07, Steve Cayford <cayfo001 at umn.edu> wrote:
>> Hello, I'm running a Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) system.
>>
>> When a user right-clicks or double-clicks on a file icon, what controls the
>> preferred application that gets listed in the context menu? (eg. Open with...)
>>
>> I know I can change it under the file "properties" and the setting will then
>> show up in ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list. However, I would like to
>> set the initial default so users don't need to mess with this when they first
>> login. Specifically, double-clicking a text file opens it with emacs by
>> default, which is a bit technical for my new users.
>>
>> It seems that this should be controlled by
>> /etc/xdg/xubuntu/applications/defaults.list, but there is no entry in there
>> specifying emacs. In fact the entry for text/plain is mousepad.desktop.
> 
> Not sure exactly what you are seeing, as it works for me here, same
> distro and all.
> 
> Did you check the local defaults.list file, to make sure that it
> wasn't altered to open Emacs? Is this a completely fresh user on the
> system?

Yes, I start out with a new user, verify that the
~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list file only contains "[Default
Applications]" with no entries. But I get emacs when double-clicking a text file.

I've done a fair bit of system modification since I'm using it for an LTSP
server so I may have tweaked something by accident, but I can't figure out what.

-Steve