I am a confirmed Gnome user, and this little issue would not cause me to change that, but it irritates me nonetheless. I am in general agreement with the philosophy that esoteric changes to the DI do not need to be obvious, and I am happy with gconf-editor and manually editing menu selections.

I am using Gnome 2.18 on Debian AMD64 Sid. In older versions of Gnome, one of the choices in System|Preferences|Preferred Applications was the ability to select a default Gnome Text Editor. That option is gone, and no amount of searching on my part has turned up a workaround. I want Scribes for the default editor in Gnome. Could it be that the Gnome developers in their wisdom have decided I should not have that option?

All the recent documentation I've seen says, "Gedit is the default text-editor in Gnome," with no suggestion that it can be changed.

I am having the same problem..any ideas/clues??

I guess the closest thing is to use the old Nautilas trick. Right click on a text file, select Properties|Open With, then the editor of choice, in my case ... Scribes. Now when I double click a text file it opens in Scribes and if I right click one, Scribes is the default option.

I can't change the Accessories|Text Editor menu item to open Scribes, but by copying it to the panel, I can open Properties there and change that launcher to Scribes. Apparently that works to change Gnome's default editor in everything except name.