I’ve tried every tutorial I could find. From symlinking the desired terminal to gnome-terminal, or using the update-alternatives command to using the gsettings command to set the default terminal. Nothing works.
What is the definitive way to set the default terminal for this GUI action? And why is this so hard to do?!
I’m on Fedora if it’s relevant.
Went down the rabbit hole for you while drinking some tea listening to the rain - it looks like in the future there is a new app/proposal for FreeDesktop to use
xdg-terminal-exec
as the new/default way and it’s hard coded into the GNOME “gio” code over here (ctrl+f search xdg-terminal-exec): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/blob/main/gio/gdesktopappinfo.cThat said, it looks like the nautilus-open-terminal Nautilus extension is shipped as part of
gnome-terminal
so it’s hard coded to run that terminal not using the above code. Instead, you’d need to leverage a different extension callednautilus-open-any-terminal
for now until the landscape changes: https://github.com/Stunkymonkey/nautilus-open-any-terminal(disclaimer: not using GNOME/Nautilus or Fedora, theorycraft from me)
I hope it won’t take too long until this is implemented. It’s baffling that such a thing is not possible in an easy and accessible way and instead is hardcoded.
This is unfortunately a choice the Nautilus (GNOME) folks have taken; in other file managers (Thunar for XFCE, Caja for MATE, etc.) the ability to use custom actions are a first class citizen. Within Nautilus, the
nautilus-actions
project was superseded by thefilemanager-actions
project which was then archived: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/filemanager-actions - a custom GNOME action might be something likegio open /path/to/terminal.desktop %d
(where %d is the directory from Nautilus)There are 3rd party attempts to recreate what was stripped out of/abandoned in Nautilus such as this one: https://github.com/bassmanitram/actions-for-nautilus