Ubuntu – Why can’t I make a file association in Nautilus

mime-typenautilus

After upgrading to 11.10, the association I had created to open SGF files with an application called quarry is lost.

If I select Right-button->Properties->Open With… on an SGF file, quarry is not listed, but it appears in the Right-button->Open With… menu.

What's going on here?

By the way, i tried "mimeopen whatever.sgf" and it works. So mime-types associations are ok, but something is broken in nautilus it seems… For example:

% mimeopen Kogo.sgf

Please choose a default application for files of type application/x-go-sgf

1) Quarry  (quarry)
2) notepad  (wine-extension-txt)
3) GVim Text Editor  (gvim)
4) gedit  (gedit)
5) AbiWord  (abiword)
6) Other...

As you can see, Quarry is properly detected. But in the Properties->Open With dialog in Nautilus, Quarry is not availaible. And because in 11.10 Nautilus doesn't longer provides the option to add a custom command to open an application, i have no way to add a file association.

Best Answer

I had the same issue with Nautilus not allowing me to set acroread as the default for pdf files. Perhaps you can use something like I did to fix things up. Like you, mimeopen worked fine.

xdg-mime query default application/pdf # show current association

xdg-mime default /usr/share/applications/acroread.desktop application/pdf

This also made firefox open my pdf links with acroread, which was my real goal, because the default evince "Document Viewer" doesn't open up tab panes and opening up 10+ separate viewers with the Unity desktop is r-e-a-l-l-y painful.

Maybe a similar use of xdg-mime can fix your setup too?

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