Bdtyktl

I save links as files, rather the using bookmarks. I just drag the URL field from Firefox onto my desktop/folder.

Recently these stopped opening in Firefox, and started "opening" in Gedit. Even in Gedit, the file errors. The only way I can open these to even see the link is by using vim, having navigated to the file from the terminal.

There are a number of threads with similar problems, to solutions to which I have tried to no avail. <THIS THREAD> describes exactly my problem, but no solution is posted.

Example URL File Contents:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Name=Link to Google

Type=Link

URL=http://www.google.com

Icon=text-html

Contents of my ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list:

[Added Associations]

application/x-rpm=ubuntu-software-center.desktop;

x-scheme-handler/mailto=thunderbird.desktop;

message/rfc822=thunderbird.desktop;

application/x-extension-eml=thunderbird.desktop;

inode/directory=vlc.desktop;

application/pdf=inkscape.desktop;kde4-okularApplication_pdf.desktop;

text/x-python=vim.desktop;gedit.desktop;

application/pgp-keys=libreoffice-calc.desktop;

image/x-hdr=gedit.desktop;

text/plain=libreoffice-calc.desktop;

audio/x-vorbis+ogg=totem.desktop;

application/octet-stream=gedit.desktop;

x-scheme-handler/ftp=firefox.desktop;

x-scheme-handler/chrome=firefox.desktop;

text/html=firefox.desktop;

application/x-extension-htm=firefox.desktop;

application/x-extension-html=firefox.desktop;

application/x-extension-shtml=firefox.desktop;

application/xhtml+xml=firefox.desktop;

application/x-extension-xhtml=firefox.desktop;

application/x-extension-xht=firefox.desktop;



[Default Applications]

x-scheme-handler/mailto=thunderbird.desktop

message/rfc822=thunderbird.desktop

application/x-extension-eml=thunderbird.desktop

application/pdf=kde4-okularApplication_pdf.desktop

text/html=firefox.desktop

x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop

x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop

x-scheme-handler/about=chromium-browser.desktop

x-scheme-handler/unknown=chromium-browser.desktop

audio/x-vorbis+ogg=totem.desktop

x-scheme-handler/ftp=firefox.desktop

x-scheme-handler/chrome=firefox.desktop

application/x-extension-htm=firefox.desktop

application/x-extension-html=firefox.desktop

application/x-extension-shtml=firefox.desktop

application/xhtml+xml=firefox.desktop

application/x-extension-xhtml=firefox.desktop

application/x-extension-xht=firefox.desktop

And here is a screen-shot of Gedit trying to open these:

Any help super appreciated, as this is driving me crazy.

It appears I borked things when following <a tutorial> to set things up so I could just right-click files to open them in vim.

The two resources I found most helpful to figure this out were:

• <This>


• <And This>

There was clearly nothing wrong with the url files, as navigating to their parent directory and running the following opened them in firefox just fine:

# firefox url-name.desktop

This indicated that there was an issue with the Exec line for firefox getting run properly. I then discovered that I had a symbolic link to my firefox.desktop file by running the following in my user specific directory:

# ls -l ~/.local/share/applications/

As described in the second link, mimeapps.list is a user-specific list of default applications to be used to open various mime-types (i.e. file types).

I renamed this file to archive it, and then I created a sym-link to the defaults.list:

# ln -s /local/share/applications/defaults.list/ ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list

Restarting firefox, and everything worked! Phew. Hopefully, this helps somebody. Now to see what I did wrong with that vim tutorial...

Don't know if that's the problem, but it looks like a wrong URL in your example:

URL=http://www.google.html

The top-level domain (.com, .de, …) is missing.

Maybe the gedit error could be a result of this, because of the /, if gedit might think that it's a local file path (instead of a Internet URL)? Doesn't seem plausible, though (why does gedit even bother? Shouldn't it simply show the text file content anyway?). Is gedit trying to navigate to the URL?

I just experienced the same problem in 16.04 where web links on my desktop was being opened on gedit instead of firefox with the error:

Could not open the file “https://...”. Unable to handle “http:” locations."' 

I was able to fix the problem by editing:

~/.config/mimeapps.list

Find the entry:

application/octet-stream=gedit.desktop;

This entry will mostly likely under the [Added Associations] heading. Move this entry to under the [Removed Associations] heading. Save the mimeapps.list file and the behaviour should be fixed immediately.