Bug#1117382: gnome-session: XML files should open in a text editor by default, rather than in a web browser

[Simon McVittie]

On Sun, 05 Oct 2025 at 17:03:25 +0200, Amr Ibrahim wrote:
>I am not sure which Debian package this bug should be assigned to. However,
>please change it if necessary, as I don't believe it is GNOME-specific.

It is GNOME-specific, and in fact gnome-session might be the correct 
GNOME package (or rather, gnome-session-common). Apps only announce 
whether they *can* open a particular file format, and it's up to the 
desktop environment to have a preference for which of the apps that can 
open a particular file format *should* open it by default.

Specifically, in GNOME the preference order is controlled by 
/usr/share/applications/gnome-mimeapps.list, and in non-GNOME 
environments it's controlled by some other 
/usr/share/applications/*-mimeapps.list.

(A corollary is that if you want this to change in non-GNOME desktop 
environments, you would have to open separate bugs for those other 
desktop environments.)

However, none of the text editors currently announce that they want to 
be considered for XML and other markup/programming formats: only the web 
browsers and gnome-builder announce specific support for text/xml and 
application/xml, and only gnome-builder for programming languages like 
C. Perhaps gnome-text-editor, gedit, etc. should also announce 
themselves as a good handler for programming and markup languages, but 
currently they do not.

     smcv