Bug#295829: acknowledged by developer (You can already do this using "Open With")

[Stewart Jeacocke]

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 14:52 +0000, Matthew Newton wrote:
> This only changes the text editor for that type of file. Many different
> types of file open with a text editor, and it should be possible to
> change the system default for all of them.

I think upstream bug 155612 [1] will shed some light on this (I can't
check at the moment because the gnome bugzilla is down). There used to
be a Text Editor tab in preferred applications but it was apparently
decided that it was confusing so it has been removed. I'm not going to
re-open this bug since it would appear that upstream do not want to
implement it. 

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155612