URL and files are not opened with the default apps

[pH142857]

Thanks in advance for your bug report!

• Have you reproduced issue in safe mode?
• Have you used the debugging guide to try to resolve the issue?
• Have you checked our FAQs to make sure your question isn't answered there?
• Have you checked to make sure your issue does not already exist?
• Have you checked you are on the latest release of Pulsar?

What happened?

Disclaimer: not a techie!

Two symptoms:

• URLs open with Brave while my default browser is Firefox;
• PDFs open (thanks to the open-external package) with LibreOffice Impress while my default PDF reader is Evince.

My understanding is that my Pulsar does not use the standard default way to open URLs and files which is defined by XDG.
As it also concerns URL, I suppose this has nothing to do with the open-external package per se.

I am using the latest deb version of Pulsar.

Pulsar version

1.132.1

Which OS does this happen on?

🐧 Debian based (Linux Mint, Ubuntu, etc.)

OS details

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Which CPU architecture are you running this on?

x86_64/AMD64

What steps are needed to reproduce this?

• Right-click on a URL in a text file, select "Open link"
• Install open-external package, add pdf to the list of unsupported extensions, click on a PDF in the tree-view

Additional Information:

No response

[confused-Techie]

Thanks a ton for reporting this issue!

This one does seem to be e duplicate of #1361 (At least for the browser opening aspect).

So interesting that this does seem to be still occurring.

But since that issue was created and I originally responded, there's been new activity on the original Electron bug here which may prove to be helpful!

But to summarize what I wrote on the other issue:

Pulsar itself doesn't really do much of anything special in opening links to the browser, we rely on Electron to handle this via

import {shell} from 'electron';
shell.openExternal(link);

So if this is mis-behaving, it's likely something wrong within Electron itself.

The most recent comment on the Electron issue for this bug, mentions that XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP within Electron is being mis-detected. I'd be curious what that value looks like on your system when running Pulsar, and if we could modify it the same way that's mentioned on the Electron bug we might be able to find a workaround here.

As for the community package open-external, unfortunately as it's a community package we have no capabilities to troubleshoot or resolve any issues. Luckily, it's made by the wonderful asiloisad, who is still quite active in the Pulsar space, so a bug report on their package's repo may be a good idea for anything specific to that package.

[pH142857]

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation. Here is what you asked:

echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
ubuntu:GNOME

Running env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME pulsar does work around the issue (including for open-external). Yay!

The other workaround is to add to ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list a list of mime-program association:

application/pdf=org.gnome.Evince.desktop
x-scheme-handler/http=firefox_firefox.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=firefox_firefox.desktop

However these are not definitive solutions. I've been browsing the Electron issues you mentioned but at this point I'm unsure how and if the original problem will be solved by Electron. I think this is a very unpleasant issue which could make me switch to another editor, I wish I could help. Not sure either if you want to keep this issue opened to support our case at Electron's or not, so I'll leave it to you.
Thanks again.

[savetheclocktower]

Running env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME pulsar does work around the issue (including for open-external). Yay!

That sounds like a solution for now, so maybe it's worth setting XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME in your shell startup file — or else something like alias pulsar="env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME pulsar" for a more targeted fix. That'll at least buy us some time to fix this.

@confused-Techie, this PR might be worth investigating; it demonstrates a workaround for the Electron bug.

[confused-Techie]

@savetheclocktower Interesting, helpful they provided the targeted snippet in their issue comment.

Seems like they switched to calling xdg-open directly on Linux, ensuring to pass XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP if set (and switched to using showItemInFolder but not sure if that's totally relevant to what we need).

Seems like a simple enough fix, depending on how many times we call this function. I'll try to take a look through soon to see where and how often we shell out to shell.openExternal(), but hopefully this would be workable! Good find