Sunday, July 27, 2014

Here's for Linux Mint XFCE

One thing I like in Linux Mint Xfce and that I don't see in Netrunner KDE is the ability to right-click a file, choose a program to open it, and then teach the desktop to always use that program in the future. With Netrunner, it's an ongoing battle to have it use Jedit to open up .sql, .html, .shtml. Netrunner wants to always use Kate, which is extremely limited and has a lot of problems dealing with plain text files. I cannot even open, as root, using Jedit, a text file at all in Dolphin and have given up on what should be an elementary procedure that even Windows 3.1 was capable of managing.

What I have had to do in Netrunner as a workaround is drop to the terminal in the directory with my .sql file and enter sudo jedit suchandsuch.sql each and every time I need to edit the file. That annoyance is enough to make me not want to use Netrunner in the future, and combined with KDE's propensity to freeze, then reboot the desktop for no apparent reason makes me not want to choose KDE in the future as a desktop. I think I will stick with good, old, tried-and-true XFCE, Linux Mint edition, thank you very much.

It is impossible to register for Netrunner's forum, so raising the issue there is a no-go.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi igor,

the dolphin over here on Netrunner has the option to right-click on a file and choose "Open with" then at the end of a list of suggested programs have the option "Other...", which brings up a popup for either selecting a program from the menu hierachie or simply type in the name of the program ("jedit") and TICK Remember application association for this type of file".
Another way is System Settings -> File Associations to finetune programs and their order in which they are listed for each file type.
Hope that works for you, all the best.

igor said...

OK, I find that this works.

Now I'm confused, because it wasn't working yesterday. I tried to open an .sql file with lines that were 4000 chars. long. Kate couldn't handle it. So I installed Jedit and found that there wasn't an option in Dolphin to teach it to open .sql with Jedit. But now it's working for some reason. I think ultimately this was a permissions error, like so many problems in Linux. Probably the .sql file got downloaded with read-only permissions and that disabled the teaching function in Dolphin. I think I wound up changing the permissions for the entire Download directory or maybe even ALL of Home. At any rate, it is working now. So that is not the fault of KDE.

Howsomeever, KDE does freeze and reset the desktop from time to time, which Xfce doesn't do, so that little objection remains, although it's not a frequent occurence... but, still....

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