Default Applications Launched From Terminal

Posted in: technology. Tagged: linux, cli, pekwm

For some time it has irritated me that launching URLs from my terminal would always launch Iceweasel/Firefox, rather than my default browser Chromium. If you’re running KDE or Gnome, then I accept that this would be governed from somewhere in the desktop environment’s control panel or settings, but I run PekWM, and assumed that setting the default browser in update-alternatives should be enough:

# update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

Unfortunately of course many of the applications that I am using are native to KDE or Gnome and probably are still respecting their environment’s settings. In the end it was simply a case of editing:

~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list

And adding the following lines:

x-scheme-handler/http=chromium.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=chromium.desktop

Now opening links from my terminal is correctly opening a new tab in Chromium, or running Chromium if it isn’t already.

Joy.