Customizing xdg-open on a per-application basis

mgillen2000 · 02-10-2017, 10:01 AM

I've got a non-standard use case and can't seem to find a hint about how to do it. I have an application that uses xdg-open to open a browser. I want to customize the browser that application uses, while not changing my system-wide default browser.

The customization of mime-types and such only help with executing the direct application, and don't seem to address this need to do a targeted change for a particular application.

I would be open to wrapping the application in a script if there was some way to override what xdg-open does with environment variables, but my initial look at doing that (using $BROWSER) didn't have the desired effect.

Any ideas on things I could try?

ondoho · 02-10-2017, 04:00 PM

my first thought was environment variables:

Code:

$ env|grep XDG
XDG_VTNR=1
XDG_SESSION_ID=c2
XDG_SEAT=seat0
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000

these could be modified freely for your application, e.g.

Code:

XDG_SESSION_ID=d1 thunderbird

maybe you could create your customized xdg session?