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dr Hannibal Lecter
Asked: 2010-11-21 10:02:41 +0800 CST

How do I force Gnome Commander to use VLC instead of Movie Player by default?

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When I double click on a video file in Gnome Commander, for some reason it opens in Movie Player (Totem?) instead of VLC, which is set as preferred for all file types. Clicking on the same file from Nautilus opens the file in VLC.

Is there a way to force Gnome Commander to use "standard" gnome mime-type associations?

Update:

Following iamsid's answer below, this is what I did:

Edit the file ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list (if the file does not exist, create it), and add the following:

[Default Applications]
video/x-msvideo=vlc.desktop
video/x-flv=vlc.desktop
video/mp2t=vlc.desktop
video/mp4=vlc.desktop
video/mpeg=vlc.desktop
video/ogg=vlc.desktop
video/x-theora+ogg=vlc.desktop
video/x-ms-wmv=vlc.desktop

You can of course add other mime types as needed. To see a file's mime type, you can right-click on a file in Gnome Commander, go to properties and then the Metadata tab. Expand the "file" item and you will see the mime type under "Format" tag.

vlc.desktop already exists in /local/share/applications, so you can use that, I used a custom .desktop file in my ~/local/share/applications folder, but found out it's not necessary.

10.10 mplayer vlc

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This feature is currently broken in GNOME Commander.

    Since GNOME has changed to follow the freedesktop.org standard of handling mimetypes, the editing of preferred programs in GNOME Commander is currently broken (v 1.1.7). We do have this in our TODO file, but until GCMD can handle edititing of preferred programs, there are two other ways of managing this on user basis; use nautilus or manually edit the configuration files that controls mime types in your home directory. Using Nautilus for doing this can feel quite awkward for GNOME Commander users, we usually do not use GNOME Commander because we like using Nautilus." - GNOME Commander

    Here is how to do it manually: https://gcmd.github.io/doc.html#mime

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  2. I am using ubuntu 13.10

    Editing file ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list or ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list does not work for Gnome Commander. The file you need to edit is located at /etc/gnome/defaults.list

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  3. After a long time of silence, this issue is finally solved in the current development branch of Gnome Commander since Christmas 2020. This is yet to be released in the future. When this happens, Gnome Commander will open files with the same default application as other file managers do by default (using GIO).

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