I somehow managed to unknowingly change the default app for opening directories on my laptop. E.g. when I use the option open containing folder in a program like Evince, my editor (vscode) opens up instead of my file manager (Nautilus).

I have been experiencing this for some months now and it is not that much of a problem, but every time I stumble upon it I tend to start looking for solutions and every time I am unable to find a solution.

I am using Gnome and I know how to change the default apps for web, mail, calendar, music, video and photos in settings. I also checked Gnome tweaks and dconf editor, but searches for directory, folder and default do not seem to list any entries for default directory settings.

Does anybody know how to change the default app for opening directories in Gnome or where these settings could be stored?

Further Details

The answer of matthewsnyder seems to point in the right direction. When opening a directory with xdg-open, vscode is started instead of Nautilus. However, when running

xdg-mime query default inode/directory

the output indicates that Nautilus should be the default app for opening directories again. Even though xdg-open clearly does not use Nautilus.

I also tried running in debug mode using

XDG_UTILS_DEBUG_LEVEL=10 xdg-open ~

but this only provides the following additional information: Selected DE gnome3

posted 9 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

9mo ago

mr Tsjolder‭

146 reputation 3 6 17 4