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Wonky
Asked: 2020-05-11 22:03:01 +0800 CST

How do I change default terminal for executing .desktop files?

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I've been trying to execute vim with alacritty as default. I have alacritty set as my default terminal emulator already, and in my vim.desktop I changed exec=vim %F with exec=alacritty -e vim %F. The problem is that when I open a file it first executes the command in gnome terminal and then launches vim in alacritty, the thing is that the gnome terminal stays open. I have also tried creating an script:

#!/bin/bash
alacritty -e vim & disown | exit

this does not work at all. I don't know what else to do and I cant find anything online. Thanks in advance!

Is it possible to change the default terminal that runs the Exec= command? so that just by writing Exec=vim %F would run it in alacritty

vim command-line bash .desktop

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    muru helped me clarify what was going on, thank you! The problem was that my .desktop file:

    [Desktop Entry]
Name=Vim
GenericName=Text Editor
Comment=Edit text files
Comment[es]=Edita archivos de texto
TryExec=vim
Exec=alacritty -e 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++;

    Had the argument Terminal=true. What this does is that it executes the Exec= command in a terminal, opening a terminal to do so. If you set Terminal=false this will prevent any terminal from opening and it will just execute the command without opening the terminal.

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  2. I've posted an answer to a similar question on U&L

    TL;DR - prepend_terminal_to_vector() prefers gnome-terminal the most. Create a wrapper script /usr/local/bin/gnome-terminal which invokes the actual terminal emulator based on what $# $@ it receives.

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  3. Edit: this does not work sometimes, I don't know what is controlling what terminal emulator is used when you open vim.

    I just found another work-around for this problem: create a symlink named xterm in your $PATH to your own terminal emulator. I can not guarantee this works for everyone though.

    The advantage of this work-around is you don't need to change any desktop entry files. All .desktop with Terminal=true will use the new terminal emulator.

    When trying to exec a desktop entry with exo-open (similar to xdg-open, from xfce), there is a warning message

    sh: line 0: exec: xterm: not found

    So I guess xterm is hard-coded in the program to open .desktop files. Then I tried to make this symlink

    ln -s /usr/bin/st ~/.local/bin/xterm

    and it works perfectly.

    However the actual command spawned is probably based on xterm's arguments, so only the terminal emulators which use the same argument to specify the start-up command works. One counter example is termite, since it requires the whole command to be quoted in the -e option.

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