Bug#1055838: gnome: GNOME Text Editor not chosen or listed for text files

[Simon McVittie]

Control: reassign -1 gnome-session-common 45.0-1
Control: affects -1 + gnome-core

On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 at 14:12:25 +0100, Paul Menzel wrote:
> With Debian sid/unstable and *gnome* 1:44+1, text files, for example with
> the suffix .txt, are opened with LibreOffice Writer and not GNOME Text
> Editor (*gnome-text-editor* 45.0-1).

This seems to be because /usr/share/applications/gnome-mimeapps.list in
gnome-session-common lists gedit but not gnome-text-editor. It should
list both, with some appropriate default priority order (presumably
gnome-text-editor > gedit, since gnome-text-editor is the one that is
pulled in by the gnome-core metapackage).

You should be able to work around this by editing ~/.config/mimeapps.list
to add:

[Default Applications]
text/plain=org.gnome.TextEditor.desktop

This should be fixed by a change to gnome-session-common rather than gnome,
so I'm reassigning the bug.

> It’s not even listed in the application choices.

I'm surprised by that, because
/usr/share/applications/org.gnome.TextEditor.desktop does list text/plain
as a supported file type, but perhaps updating gnome-mimeapps.list would
fix that too.

    smcv