If you’re scratching your head wondering why your launchers for folders and drives are opening with something other than the default file manager, Nautilus, then hopefully the answer you’re looking for is here.
If you’re experiencing this, you might find your desktop launchers to be fine, but those you’ve custom made for your panel, and even those in the Places menu, will be opening with the wrong program.
In my case, I had right-clicked a DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder and used Open With to open the title with SMPlayer (since the folder was on my hard drive), and all was well – until I clicked a location launcher on my panel. I had done this before without issue, but suddenly all my location launchers started opening SMPlayer, which then tried to find anything to play in the folder Nautilus was supposed to open. It might be a coincidence, but I saw others complaining of this strangeness occurring with another media player – the popular VLC.
If something similar is happening to you, you don’t need me to tell you that something has changed the default app for the task. And while you may have done similar to me in opening a folder with a program like a media player, there is no way you could have accidentally set it to be the default task. But there is a way to fix this, and you don’t even need root privileges for it.
Simply run the following command in a terminal or via Alt+F2:
gedit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
When the file opens, look for the line starting with inode/directory= and you should see the offending app listed at the beginning, ahead of Nautilus. All you have to do is either remove it or put it on the end of the line, making sure that nautilus-folder-handler.desktop is directly after inode/directory=.
Once you save and exit the file, your location launchers should be back to normal.
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Did this information make your day? Did it rescue you from hours of headache? Then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or some fish’n’chips for my time and effort! Many thanks!
You saved my life. I was going crazy with this!
Thank you.
cf
Thank you.
Piero
Awesome! Very much helpful :)
thats kinda it but not. okay when i go to stream on swiftfox it wants to open streams with ryhtmbox, when its suppose to be movie player, same with my torrent program being transmission instead of tixati. i dont know where the files are located so its driving me crazy
Hi. Don’t really think I can help here, especially since it seems totally unrelated to the article (which is about launchers, Nautilus, and the Gnome panel). You obviously need to be looking up info on Firefox/Swiftfox, especially changing application settings. I assume you’ve already gone into Edit > Preferences and made sure things are opening with what you want, but if not, your answer is there. As for where your torrents are being downloaded to, well, that shouldn’t be hard to find, as somewhere in the program it would be specifying a target folder, and if it isn’t visible in the download list, you will be able to find it under Settings/Preferences/Options (depending on the program). Anyway, I strongly suggest you look up info on how to change default applications Firefox uses (though, as I said, you can find and edit all that under Edit > Preferences > Applications). All the best
you saved my life great thanks
Thank you a million!!
Thanks!
Thanks a lot!
I get the default problem but, when I run the list, it is empty. Any suggestions?
I’m sorry – could you please be more specific (not sure what “run the list” means), and I’ll see if I can help. Do you mean when you open mimeapps.list, the file is empty? Cheers.
Thanks for this Post! I’ve been trying to figure the problem for hours and eventually stumbled on your page, same issue with SMplayer doing the stuff :D
Bravo! Once again the linux community has come to the rescue.
I have been a loyal user since the first blue screen of death in 1995, and whenever I have a problem someone knows how to fix it. I love linux as much as I do s_x or beer. Keep up the good work.
That has solved my problem, thank you very much
now porn doesnt pop up when ever i try to do anything hurray!!
If anyone has this problem on Linux Mint go to the ~/.local/share/applications/ folder and delete the two files “nautilus-browser.desktop” and “nautilus-folder-handler.desktop”.
that was it !
Thank you. Thank you. That was annoying, your fix worked beautifully.
Thank you! Very useful article.
wow…its working. thx a lot