Thunar fails to open gedit files

Question

When I try to open a file with gedit in Thunar, I get a loading cursor for a few seconds, then nothing happens. In Task Manager I can see gedit --gapplication-service start for a while, then close and that's it.

This happens both double-clicking, right-click->open with->gedit, or using right-click->open with->other->select gedit.

The closest similar error I can find is here; although no solution was posted a suggested workaround of double-clicking twice in succession does work.

I recently tried to sort out issues with calibre (ebook manager) taking over every filetype, so this is probably a result of that mimetype fiddling. In all honesty though I'm not sure of all steps I took to cure it, as it took some time to do. I did perform a few "update-mime-database" executions, which may be related?

I noticed there was no gedit.deskotp file in /usr/share/applications/, so created one, but the only effect was two entries of gedit in my start menu, so I scrapped it. In fact a search shows I do have gedit.desktop files located in: /usr/share/app-install/desktop/gedit.desktop and /var/lib/menu-xdg/applications/menu-xdg/X-Debian-Applications-Editors-gedit.desktop

Can anyone offer any advice?

Using Thunar 1.6.3 and gedit 3.14.0 on Linux Mint Debian with XFCE.

Answer 1

I did some further digging today and came across this thread: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/3491745-can-t-open-a-text-file-from-nautilus Evidently the devs have recognised it as an issue with dbus service; it seems there's a fix in later versions. Synaptic won't let me force the newer version though, and trying to compile from source gives a tonne of dependancies I can't seem to find in the repos, so I can't confirm. I think I'll just work around it for now and wait for the fix to work it's way down.