As a default test editor gEdit is worlds ahead of Notepad on the other OS, but it's hopeless for editing very large files,

Long ago, I replaced Notepad on Windoze with EditPadLite, freeware. What a great program that is. I recently discovered that there is now a Linux version. Hallelujah!

Now my question. I went into Preferences / More Preferences / Preferred Aplications and told Gnome that I wanted a Custom Editor instead of the defaults it preferred to offer me. The information appeared to be accepted, but when I double clicked on a .txt file, it still opened in gEdit. Went back to Preferred Applications and repeated my effort ... several times. No luck. When I close the Preferred Applications window, everything goes back to the default.

Is there a place I can go from a terminal window to change my Text Editor default?

Right click on a text file, properties>open with>add

With your method, did you check the box that says to open the files with that app in the file manager?

(I'm only doing one of my periodic playing-with-knome things before I get pissed off again and delete them, so if it's more complicated than that, I dunno.)

Right click on a text file, properties>open with>add

I can do that, but, I want .txt files to open by default (double click) in my preferred editor. 'Open with...' takes a few extra clicks, and I have to type in the app name.

With your method, did you check the box that says to open the files with that app in the file manager?

Yes

Well, that should set the default so that, after doing that, you can just double-click. May have to select the sort of radio button to specify the default.

Hm. That should work. We are talking nautilus, either from the desktop or inside the filer pane, right? Any other file manager (like rox) would require its own configuration. This is not specific help but, when I was trying to turn the menu into something sensible, some of my changes weren't taking effect. Turns out some of these 'desktop' files were only in the system-wide directory and, amazingly, some in $HOME were owned by me, yet had *read-only* permission. So copying the desktop files and chmodding them all made my menu changes stick. File associations are handled differently, but that may give you a starting place: track down the relevant file and make sure it's writable by you. GUI config editors are almost always broken and text files - *plain* text files - are so much easier, sensible, and effective, but that's the way knome does stuff.

Sorry. You are correct. I didn't understand what you were telling me to do. Now it works splendidly. Changing the properties for one file applies to all others of that type.

FTR: 1. Right click on a plain text file.
2. Select 'Properties'
3. Select 'Add' & 'Browse to' or type the command for the new default.
4. Make sure the radio button for you preferred application is selected.

The Preferred Applications dialog does NOT work, as near as I can tell.

Ah, cool. Nothing worse than getting an editor you don't want.