Marijn's questions

Okular has problems detecting Markdown files. For example (adapted from https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430538#c9) the following two files, for which only the second one is rendered as Markdown (Okular 21.12.3, Markdown backend 0.1.0 from okular-extra-backends, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS):

File 1

### This is supposed to be a markdown document

Here are the properties that `mimetype` and `file` show for this file:

- `mimetype`: text/markdown
- `file --mime-type`: text/plain
- Open With: `Okular`

        This file is opened in Okular with the Txt backend

File 2

# Add this line to change the backend
### This is supposed to be a markdown document

Here are the properties that `mimetype` and `file` show for this file:

- `mimetype`: text/markdown
- `file --mime-type`: text/plain
- Open With: `Okular`

        This file is opened in Okular with the Markdown backend

Both are valid Markdown (there is no rule in the spec that you need to start with header level 1). However, the first file is rendered as plain text while the second file is rendered as Markdown.

Of course it would be nice if Okular would recognize Markdown more reliably (some obvious approaches for this come to mind) but my question until this happens:

Is it possible to manually select the backend that is used to open a file in Okular? Either from the terminal (something like okular --backend=markdown myfile.md) or from the Okular GUI after the file is opened with the wrong backend? Or maybe the file properties for an individual file can be modified, or something system-wide regarding the process for reporting the mime type can be configured (assuming that file --mime-type and Okular use the same underlying process) to convince Okular to use the Markdown backend?

Since the upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.1 (from 18.04.1) gedit appears to have a new feature for line breaking.

With the preferences "line breaking" and "don't split words across two lines" both activated, gedit splits a line on certain symbols within a string, for example xyz/abc will be split after the /. Other characters that allow this are for example |!?.

However, the editor shows a hyphen symbol - when such a split is made. Screenshot:

To emphasize: I did not type the -, I typed xyz/abc and this was the output.

This feature is confusing for me, especially when I write programming code, or worse, when I read code written by others, thinking that there is a - in the code. Another case is urls in text files, which have a lot of / characters, where it looks as if there is a - in the url. There is no way to find this out by just looking at the editor, if you type xyz/-abc then the output is exactly the same. The only way to find out is to resize the editor window (then the - disappears) or to disable line breaking.

Is there a way to switch off this feature?

I have an icon for gedit in my launcher in Ubuntu 16.04. I had a problem with multiple icons in the launcher (see, e.g., Why are there two icons in the Unity launcher for Nautilus?), which I solved by some random unlock from launcher-lock to launcher actions. Now I have a single icon that starts gedit.

However, when I click on this icon, gedit is started in /. This is visible in the embedded terminal and in the save location for new documents (as well as the location for 'open other documents' when a new document is in focus).

How can I change this location? I tried to edit /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.gedit.desktop to read Exec=cd ~;gedit %U but that resulted in compiz being active for 10sec at 15% cpu and then terminating without starting gedit.

When I start gedit from the terminal in any directory the location is set to this directory.

I also have a /usr/share/applications/gedit.desktop file but it is not used. dconf-editor shows that the org.gnome file is used, and indeed making changes to this file (e.g., changing captions) is reflected in the launcher.