Ubuntu – How to make vim the default graphical text editor

default-programsvim

While trying to make vim default instead of gedit, I found this could be done two ways:

Use defaults.list and make text/plain (and others) point to vim.desktop (what is the format for creating .desktop files?)

Use update-alternatives and change gnome-text-editor (right now it has only one alternative, so I guess I have to install one more. How to do that?)

and which is the better way to do it?

Best Answer

OP fixed the problem here:

Ok, I have created vim.desktop in ~/.local/share/applications and modified defaults.list (in the same dir) to include
text/plain=vim.desktop
After that, sudo update-mime and its working! (I am not sure whether this step is require)

Clicking on a text file opens vim, not gvim, in terminal and :q closes the terminal too.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change the default text editor

Here is what worked in my case:

Right click on a text file.
Choose "Properties" (not "Open With...")
Click on the "Open With" tab.
Choose your new text editor.
Mark chosen text editor using a button "Set as default".

This also works on 12.04 and 13.04.

@ Edit: based on comments it does work on all distros until 20.04

Ubuntu – Getting Quickly to use Gvim instead of Gedit

I assume you mean you want to change the editor that Quickly loads when you ask it to.

Well I did some sleuthing... I'll show you what I did followed by the answer.

I fired off this command:
```
sudo find / -name "*quickly*" -exec grep gedit {} \;
```
That searches for all files with quickly in and then greps them for gedit. It was a long shot -- I should have refined the search so it was any paths with quickly in but it matched!
```
Binary file /usr/share/quickly/templates/ubuntu-application/internal/quicklyutils.pyc matches
    editor = "gedit"
```

I opened up /usr/share/quickly/templates/ubuntu-application/internal/quicklyutils.py (not the compiled version) in nano, searched for gedit and saw:

def get_quickly_editors():
    '''Return prefered editor for ubuntu-application template'''

    editor = "gedit"
    default_editor = os.environ.get("EDITOR")
    if not default_editor:
        default_editor = os.environ.get("SELECTED_EDITOR")
    if default_editor:
       editor = default_editor
    return editor

From that you can see it asks for the environment value EDITOR!

Just run your quickly commands as:
```
env EDITOR=gvim quickly edit
```
or export it to persist
```
export EDITOR=gvim
quickly edit
```
Add the export line to your ~/.bashrc line if you want it to persist between sessions.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change the default text editor

Ubuntu – Getting Quickly to use Gvim instead of Gedit

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