Set default xdg-open application to terminal program

Question

Is it possible to use terminal vim with xdg-open?

I don't have a GUI text editor because I only use vim through the terminal. (I don't care very much for gvim either.) Is it possible to tell xdg-open to open a terminal, then open vim with the selected file?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In either your .bashrc or .zshrc, depending whether you use bash or zsh respectively, export these two environment variables:

export EDITOR=vim
export VISUAL=vim

Adittionally, you might want to associate vim to the mimetype of text files:

xdg-mime default vim.desktop text/plain

Now you'll have to create a vim.desktop file in /usr/share/applications, which should execute the terminal emulator you want, opening vim.

Answer 2

I have to add a new answer, even if my comment only completes the answer by thiagowfx, because in the comments you cannot indent code.

The content of vim.desktop can be something like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Vim Text Editor
Comment=Edit text files
Exec=vim
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Icon=terminal
Categories=Utility;TextEditor;
StartupNotify=true
MimeType=text/plain;

I prefer to put it under ~/.local/share/applications.

Answer 3

TL;DR

$ xdg-mime default vim.desktop <MIMETYPE>

Or edit ~/.config/mimeapps.list.
MIMETYPE is the output of $ xdg-mime query filetype <interested-file>

---

If you are using some Desktop Environment (KDE, GNOME, LXQT, etc), you should refer to your DE's documentation. But there is the XDG standard for setting default applications for specific mime-types. Mime-type is a way to distinguish one type of file from another, see on Wikipedia, or archwiki. For example, there is text/html mime-type for *.html files, and text/plain for *.txt files. You can determine mime-type with $xdg-mime query filetype <file_you_interested>.

Mime-types are used to link applications with files, which these applications should open.
Open ~/.config/mimeapps.list wich looks something like this on my machine:

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop
...
inode/directory=org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop

[Added Associations]
application/x-shellscript=nvim-qt.desktop;
...
application/pdf=firefox.desktop;

Add to [Default Applications] section these lines

text/plain=vim.desktop
text/markdown=vim.desktop
text/html=vim.desktop

(Add another mime-types, if you need them)

vim.desktop is the file in /usr/share/applications with the following content on my machine:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Vim
TryExec=vim
Exec=vim %F
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Keywords=Text;editor;
Icon=gvim
Categories=Utility;TextEditor;
StartupNotify=false
MimeType=text/english;text/plain;text/x-makefile;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-java;text/x-moc;text/x-pascal;text/x-tcl;text/x-tex;application/x-shellscript;text/x-c;text/x-c++;

(Really, there is a lot of translations of names and comments, but they don't matter here)

Look at line Terminal=true.

By the rules in XDG Desktop Entry Specification, this line says that launcher should open the terminal emulator, and then in this terminal window should be opened your app (Exec line). Fine, yes?

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However, there is a five-year-old bug in xdg-open and xdg-open ignore Terminal key because there is no specification for the default terminal emulator.

( They tried, but in 2020 there is no spec yet. )

So if you not using DE, xdg-open doesn't respect Desktop Entry Specification for you. The person that filled bug had created a patch (which was ignored, sadly), that looks at $TERMINAL variable and open terminal emulator, so you can patch your /usr/bin/xdg-open (or $ which xdg-open).

If you don't want to change xdg-open script yourself, you can use some workarounds:

1. You can use gvim.desktop (if you had gvim in your system) or nvim-qt.desktop (qt front-end for neovim).

2. You can create a file with some name like my-vim.desktop with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=MyVim
Exec=<COMMAND TO RUN YOUR TERMINAL> vim %F
Terminal=false
Icon=gvim
Categories=Utility;TextEditor

And place it in ~/.local/share/applications.
Command to run your terminal you can get from the manual page of the prefered terminal (for example, gnome-terminal -e).
More details in Desktop Entry Specifications.

3. You can somehow read the xdg-open source code and tweaks your system that xdg-open will think you are using DE and call DE-specific tools, but I think it is strange.

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Useful links:
XDG-mime manual page - https://linux.die.net/man/1/xdg-mime
Arch wiki about XDG mime types - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_MIME_Applications
Arch wiki about XDG Desktop entry - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_entries#Application_entry
xdg-open issue - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-utils/-/issues/84