(before anyone asks, no I do not want to use emacs or any other editor you personally like. Thank you.)

Now that we have that out of the way:

I am running CentOS 6.5. I have used my strongest google-foo however despite my efforts I have not been able to find a usable answer.

I have some text files that I have edited the extension to .work to designate files that I want to be opened in nano by default. I have tried the "open as" option in gnome (command: gnome-terminal -e nano) but that only opens nano with a new buffer. Sites I have found say to make a new mimetype or edit exsting mimetypes with mimeopen, but it seems that command is not available and attempts to install it (yum install mimeopen) reward me with "no package available" message.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

on gentoo mimeopen is coming from File-MimeInfo (perl stuff) but maybe you shoudn't invent a new mime-type but use nano as default editor in your console. Search for the EDITOR or VISUAL enviroment variable and set it to nano. (With it's full path like /bin/nano)

If you want a mime type it should be enough to add it to /etc/mime.types or whatever you have on CentOs

Also have a look at the xdg commands as xdg-open, xdg-mime or xdg-settings

Thanks for the reply. I have tried every way I can think of to get text files to open with nano and all I get is ether a new buffer (nano doesn't open the file in question) or nothing happens at all (nano was not started).

I did some heavy digging and found these resources last night:
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ktopentry.html
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ource-xml.html
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...gistering.html
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...modifying.html

With the information I found within these pages I created a nano.desktop file, created another mimetype "text/work" and associated the new mimetype with nano through the defaults.list file. Now when I click on a .work file nano will open it. And while I was routing around in the defaults.list file I changed nano to the default viewer of html, php, sh, and xml. Now I can use nano for all my programming needs.

If there is more information you would like me to share let me know. Otherwise this thread can be closed