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I have an Aweseome-wm + xfce system.

Where does xfce4-mime-settings stores its values? In particular as regards default apps.
The GUI values are different for me from those on ~/.config/mimeapps.list and they have precedence over the latter.

Some defaults programs are stored in:

~/.config/xfce4/helpers.rc
/etc/xdg/xfce4/helpers.rc

But that does not include PDF types.

antonio
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  • by GUI you mean xfce4-mime-settings? In my case xfce4-mime-settings, exo-open and thunar are all coherent mimeapps.list so I can only assume that xfce4-mime-settings is using some file related to awesome-wm or the file manager you use (if not thunar) before mimeapps.list – lmcanavals Mar 27 '19 at 14:13
  • @MartínCanaval: Yes I meant `xfce4-mime-settings` GUI. `exo-open` and `thunar` are coherent with the GUI for me too, but `man exo-open` does not make it clear to me where `exo-open` takes the name of the app to open a PDF. Also, if I change the reader app in `xfce4-mime-settings`, `exo-open` updates its behaviour, so the latter seems not dictated by awesome-wm. – antonio Mar 27 '19 at 17:36

2 Answers2

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Upon trial and error in a docker, I realised what follows.

xfce4-mime-settings reads associations in preference order from:

  1. $HOME/.config/mimeapps.list
  2. /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache

Actual directories are affected by $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, and $XDG_DATA_DIRS and it is possible to have also a DE specific version of mimeapps.list with higher preference, such as xfce-mimeapps.list.
See Association between MIME types and applications

If the user modifies settings in xfce4-mime-settings, they are saved to $HOME/.config/mimeapps.list.

The file /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache can be created from scratch or updated with the standard utility from freedesktop.org desktop-file-utils

sudo update-desktop-database

i still don't know if there is tool to bulk-populate $HOME/.config/mimeapps.list

With respect to my question, apparent idiosyncaracies are solved by inspecting the cache (mimeinfo.cache).

antonio
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  • The information might be not totally accurate, so I will not yet close the question. In particular, I'd to find more about the generation of `~/.config/mimeapps.list`. – antonio Jul 04 '19 at 23:39
  • This answer is correct, but it misses subclasses. For example, `inode/mount-point` (see `/usr/share/mime/inode/mount-point.xml`) is missing in `mimeapps.list`, because it is a subclass of `inode/directory`, yet is shown seperately in `xfce4-mime-settings`. – phil294 Jan 20 '22 at 23:44
  • There is a tool to bulk set default mime type apps, calle [selectdefaultapplication](https://github.com/sandsmark/selectdefaultapplication). It is listed in the [Arch wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_MIME_Applications#Utilities). But this tool [also misses subclasses](https://github.com/sandsmark/selectdefaultapplication/issues/10). – phil294 Jan 21 '22 at 00:11
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    Sorry for spamming, but subclasses are listed under `/usr/share/mime/subclasses` – phil294 Jan 21 '22 at 00:13
  • Wow talk about unchecked config file multiplication! All of what is needed to make a mimetype should be set with one line in /etc/mime.types or $HOME/.mime.types, yet I find myself rummaging through no less than a dozen directories and individual 40 line .xml files for each and every mimetype, and that does not include the association of mimetypes with applications. – Max Power Jan 26 '23 at 23:00
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The file can be found at:

/usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache

Louis Rosenblum
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    While this may *very tersely* answer the question of "Where does xfce4-mime-settings stores its values?" it's been flagged as low-quality because of its terseness. I'll clear the flags, but is there any chance you could add some verbiage to this answer; even make a sentence of it? Thank you! – Jeff Schaller Jul 02 '19 at 13:47
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    Are you sure it saves configuration in what is presumably a root-owned location? – muru Jul 03 '19 at 11:27
  • @JeffSchaller: he is right. I also added what I have found in a separate answer – antonio Jul 04 '19 at 23:42