"Open with other application" will set selected application as default

The answer here "Open With Other Application" change the default application - #4 by bill_t indicates that i need to edit some config files to set default application for each file type.

Is there a solution to change the behaviour? It seems other distros like ubuntu are actually patching this to go back to a more expected user experience. I was hoping to find a gnome extension or something but no luck. I would understand if the first application i used for a given filetype was made the default and i then needed to change manually. But right now this default changes every time i use something specific for a given filetype. That’s quite often.

The bug on gnome is here if you’re interested, it has been open for more than 6 years: "Open with other application" will set selected application as default (#1026) · Issues · GNOME / GLib · GitLab

This is usually not a bug.

What happens is that an entry is created/added/modified in

~/.config/mimeapps.list

You can change the default application by editing the list at any time.

The behaviour i would like to achieve would be that gnome would not change my default app when i open a file with the “open with other application” menu item. From what i read, the Gnome team has indeed decided that this should be the right behaviour. I disagree and would like to set things differently. I see some distros have managed to do just that.

But i can’t find a way to get this to work how i want in Manjaro Gnome. I understand it is “the Arch way” to not patch upstream packages.

What i ideally want is something like: “when i open a so far unknown filetype, register the chosen app as the default one. when i open a known file type with a different app than the default, do not change anything. When i go in the file properties to chose the default app to open it with, change the default app.”

Maybe the solution is indeed to manually set the default application for all my file types. But if there is another way, i’m interested to read about it!

Don’t get me wrong, i really enjoy using Gnome :wink: i am merely trying to make things smoother.

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You could look in the dconf registry if there’s a setting handling this.

There is a visual editor with the dconf-editor package.

Another option is to list all schemas known to the system

gsettings list-recursively

To see what key is changed when you select an application for a file type you could run

gsettings monitor

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