App. freezing in i3

If you encounter some applications freezing or taking a long time to start while using i3, I think in particular about Skype, Discord, CMST (Connman QT GUI), Hexchat, … then may be here is a solution for you. Those app do not appreciate when the desktop does not have any notification daemon running. So you might just install and start one when i3 starts.

So I’ve just installed lxqt-notificationd. Then you can start it from i3’s config file:

exec --no-startup-id lxqt-notificationd

Now all my applications work like a charm, and I’ve no reason whatsoever to temporarily switch to XFCE4.

Default applications with GTK-3, Chromium and beyond

Today I was surprised to see a GTK-3 application opening an HTTP URL with Opera. I don’t use  Opera and I just installed by curiosity long ago and forgot about it.  I configured the Debian alternatives however GTK-3 seems to use xdg-mime as confirmed with an strace of the concerned application and references to /usr/share/applications/defaults.list. Note that you may have to create a symlink for defaults.list to /usr/share/applications/mimeapps.list.

You can use the xdg-mime command to configure the default application for each protocol:

$ xdg-mime default chromium.desktop x-scheme-handler/http
$ xdg-mime default chromium.desktop x-scheme-handler/https

You can also configure this manually by editing /usr/share/applications/defaults.list.  Just add these two lines:

x-scheme-handler/http=chromium.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=chromium.desktop

In the [Default Application] section. Thunar and Chromium also use this so you can configure them to open PDF and handle Skype calls properly. See:

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=chromium.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=chromium.desktop
x-scheme-handler/skype=skype.desktop
text/html=chromium.desktop
application/pdf=mupdf.desktop

This should do the trick. You can get the list of available MIME types with this command (note that the path depends on the location of the shared-mime-info database):

find /usr/local/share/mime -name "*.xml" -exec cat {} \; |g -E -o "type=\".*\"" | sort | uniq

Otherwise you may also use the dconf-editor from the dconf-tools package or gconf-editor to configure GNOME-2/3 default applications. With gconf you should search the following keys:

/desktop/gnome/applications
/desktop/gnome/url-handlers

With dconf instead you should search for:

/desktop/gnome/url-handlers
/org/gnome/desktop/applications