Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Making xdg-open use Chrome instead of Firefox

One of the more annoying things in Linux Mint that I came across is the fanatic persistence of using Firefox to open links after making Chrome the default browser. I know, I know... Google spying, I'm giving up privacy to some corpo that will do evil things with my sexual preferences, yadda, yadda, yadda - I don't care. I want my links to open in Chrome. Period.

Recently I came across a post on askubuntu.com that explains what needs to happen. Basically all URL opening mechanisms are using xdg-open underneath the covers so all it takes is to teach it the lesson it needs:

$ xdg-mime default google-chrome.desktop text/html
$ xdg-mime default google-chrome.desktop x-scheme-handler/http
$ xdg-mime default google-chrome.desktop x-scheme-handler/https
$ xdg-mime default google-chrome.desktop x-scheme-handler/about

Done. Now ctrl-click any links in the console and you'll have that opened in Chrome.

Happy clicking!

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